Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, published in 1956 with its iconic opening verse, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”, became one of the defining literary works of the 1960s. It was dedicated to Carl Solomon, a poet Ginsberg met in a psychiatric hospital after Solomon suffered a nervous breakdown, and was diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia. Ginsberg’s mother suffered from the same conditions.
Howl insists all this madness was caused by society: by the conformity of postwar consumer culture, by capitalism, religious repression, and Cold War politics. It’s a theory of mental illness that became ubiquitous in the 60s and 70s. Michel Foucault – the most influential social scientist of the era – believed mental illnesses were social constructs, tools of disciplinary power and the carceral state; the doctors and institutions that claimed to cure them were actually causing them. Psychiatrist and bestselling author RD Laing explained that “what is widely regarded as mental illness is, in fact, a rational response to an irrational world”.
“What we now call schizophrenia,” Laing prophesied, “will come to be seen as a form of enlightenment.”
From this perspective, mental hospitals were prisons for society’s most sensitive and creative souls, gulags where they were tortured for their non-conformity. In the subsequent decades, most hospitals across the developed world offering long-term psychiatric confinement were closed in favour of short-term hospitalisations and voluntary community treatment. Psychosis, Ginsberg preached, was not an illness, but rather a manifestation of the planetary consciousness.
Novelist Jonathan Rosen grew up in a commuter suburb in New York alongside his best friend and nearby neighbour Michael Laudor, a conspicuously brilliant student who coasted into Yale University and then a highly paid job at Bain & Co, a prestigious management consultancy.
There was a lot of madness in the air during this time: breakdowns, suicides, mass murders. Rosen suspects it has less to do with consumerism and the Cold War and a lot to do with the psychic aftermath of the 1960s; with the drugs, cults and general social chaos of that era. “The baby boomers,” he observed, “had changed the world in every way except the ways they wanted, then taken all the jobs and planned to live forever.”
After a year working at Bain, Laudor resigned. His superiors were plotting against him, he explained. Monitoring his phone calls. He tried to pursue his dream of becoming a writer but, he told his friends and family, the musicians he sometimes jammed with at a nearby bar were following him. He suspected they were members of a neo-Nazi cult, and he stayed up patrolling his house with a baseball bat waiting for them to attack.
When he moved back home, he became convinced his parents had been murdered by the same cult and replaced with identical lookalikes who were planning to murder him. He was confined to a psychiatric ward, medicated, then released after eight months.
After his release, Laudor won admission to Yale Law, and followed this with a prestigious postdoctoral scholarship. In 1995, he was profiled by the New York Times as a high-functioning role model for mental illness, proof that people suffering from schizophrenia weren’t violent or dangerous and that the new drugs available for managing the disease were game-changers.
Film director Ron Howard bought the rights to Laudor’s story for $1.5 million – Brad Pitt would play him – and he signed a $600,000 book deal with Scribners. Three years later, Laudor stabbed his pregnant fiancée to death in the midst of a psychotic episode. The court found him not guilty by reason of insanity.
Rosen’s book is partly a memoir, partly a true crime story, but wrapped around them is a deep cultural history of an era when literary theory, psychology, left-wing politics, social science and government policy all converged on theories of mental illness that had no empirical evidence to support them. (The mere demand for such evidence, Foucault would explain, was part of the real problem: the malevolent tyranny of reason.)
Rosen acknowledges the long-term confinement of psychiatric patients had deep flaws – a dark history, but he believes it’s been replaced with something far worse. Few of the community centres that were supposed to replace psychiatric hospitals were ever built. This means most people with acute mental illness live with their families, who struggle to manage these complex and sometimes dangerous conditions, or they reside on the streets where they live abbreviated lives cycling through “the revolving door” of hospitalisations followed by release, breakdown and readmission, punctuated by time in prison.
In the 2010s, a new statistical technique known as GWAR – genome-wide association studies – demonstrated schizophrenia was hereditary. All of those social construct theories were wildly wrong. Rosen notes Laudor’s grandmother was schizophrenic. Laudor himself has spent the past 24 years in a secure psychiatric facility. His life and the lives of his family were partly destroyed by madness, Rosen believes, but also by the best minds of his generation, whose ideas are still in the drinking water today.
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen (Allen Lane, $75 hb).
