The Best Minds Quotes

“Money had replaced community mental healthcare the way medication had replaced state hospitals. Medication did not go looking for those who resisted taking it, and money could not administer itself. Neither came with counseling or support. The SSI checks Michael received, and the Medicaid requirements he was eligible for, did not create a caring community or even an indifferent one. Nevertheless, checks and pills were what remained of a grand promise, the ingredients of a mental healthcare system that had never been baked but were handed out like flour and yeast in separate packets to starving people.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“There are no true animal models for the disease. You can give a rat cancer but you can’t give a rat a thought disorder.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“It was easy to say that Michael had lost his mind, but his mind was the only instrument he had for locating what he’d lost. Knowing and not knowing were gray areas to begin with, shot through with ignorance and denial.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Balzac’s assertion, which my mother also quoted, that behind every great fortune was a great crime,”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“The first antipsychotic medication was patented in the United States the same year that LSD was sent to psychiatric institutes gratis by its Swiss manufacturer. Psychiatrists had a drug for squelching hallucinations in one hand, and a drug for inducing them in the other. It was only a matter of time before things got mixed up and the symptoms of mental illness blurred into the promise of mind expansion. One generation’s brainwashing was another generation’s mental hygiene. This, too, shaped our world.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Michael was only an inch or two taller than me, and just as skinny, but he seemed to enjoy taking up space, however awkwardly he filled it.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“It was easier to be brilliant than smart, and easier to be smart than competent.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“It was easier to visit him in the hospital at the height of his illness than to encounter him on the street struggling through this intermediate existence. I wanted to think of illness and recovery as two clear, diametrically opposed states.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Deconstruction, which made “knowing” anything impossible, contained a dark but exculpatory promise, like the insanity defense. Because everything hinged on linguistic constructs, and language was infinitely contingent, it erased the line between reality and illusion. If meaning was just a metaphor, there could be no line drawn between truth and falsehood, madness and sanity, and ultimately between right and wrong.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“I loved the visualizations; had I known that the secret of the here and now was pretending to be someplace else, I might have become present a lot sooner.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“poet”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Fair enough, but why was it my frontal lobes’ fault if the primitive portion of my brain was too drunk on limbic moonshine to distinguish between real and imaginary monsters? Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the elevator floor, I had better realize that the brain isn’t an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“These dramatic cases—Weston, Laudor, Ted Kaczynski or John Hinckley—are not the typical stories of schizophrenia. Mostly it is a story of quiet suffering.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Dr. Ferber had arrived at the melancholy conclusion that there were some people who could not be healed even by a spiritual community dedicated to love, but needed to go to the hospital for treatment.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Soloveitchik,”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“His pride had always been in being among the facilitators of other people’s civil rights, not the beneficiary of their advocacy.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“The welfare office made the DMV look like a Swiss bank,”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“cure, but 25 percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia recovered completely within the first two years, a surprising and hopeful statistic often drowned out by the dread sound of the diagnosis.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Michael had carried a knife, and slept with a baseball bat, because he thought his parents had been replaced by surgically altered Nazis who had murdered them and wanted to kill him.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Michael wanted out of his prison but he also wanted to confess his crimes. He’d been “riding high on a certain presentation of myself,” he said.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“self-confidence and faith were aspects of intelligence.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“delusion is only a delusion if you don’t think it’s a delusion.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Thinking”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“In that twilight mood it was impossible for me to think about anyone without becoming them for a moment, a frighteningly porous state I feared was a kind of madness in itself, until morning came and dispelled it.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“I thought the salt was arsenic,” Michael told me once. “I thought pepper was the ashes of our people.” “What do you do with a thought like that?” I asked him. “Suffer.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Along with his familiar confidence, there was an unfamiliar undertow of agitation pulling everything he said in the opposite direction. He”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“how a cruel culture betrays its best minds and drives them into conformity and madness.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“When I told my Berkeley therapist that I was having panic attacks in the elevator of International House, he asked me why, as if they were voluntary. He cut me off before I could point the finger at childhood beatings, the Holocaust, or the Freudian saga of the dwarf cherry tree from Cooper’s Nursery that turned out to be full-size, outraging my mother, who had me lop the top off every fall. “Here’s why,” he said, tapping the eraser of his pencil against the dome of his conveniently shaven head, high above his eyes. “They’re called frontal lobes.” I laughed but he did not. It was a simple fact, he said, that the brain had evolved in stages and the parts fit together badly. Thinking caused anxiety the way walking upright caused backaches. Our ability to remember the past, imagine the future, and use language, all recent acquisitions, did not mesh well with ancient regions of the brain that had guarded us for eons, knew only the present, and did not distinguish between imaginary fears and real trouble. Fair enough, but why was it my frontal lobes’ fault if the primitive portion of my brain was too drunk on limbic moonshine to distinguish between real and imaginary monsters? Because, he told me, there is no difference between real and imaginary monsters, just as there is no difference between the past and the future: neither exists. Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life on the elevator floor, I had better realize that the brain isn’t an intellectual, any more than the stomach is a gourmet. The brain is the body, and the body lives in the present, which is all there is.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Art can’t be the lie that tells the truth in a world that cannot recognize lies.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions