‘To Live With a Serious Mental Illness Is to Be in a Constant Fight for Your Agency’
American Madness
Thousands of people with severe mental illness have been failed by a dysfunctional system. One of them, Jonathan Rosen wrote in the May 2023 issue, was his friend Michael.
Like Michael Laudor, I was diagnosed with a serious mental illness, and like Michael Laudor, I graduated from an “elite” law school, just this spring. Certainly this makes us part of a small club—but it’s not as small as Rosen or the profile he references would suggest. Perhaps the most notable example is Elyn Saks, a professor whom I had the privilege of communicating with when I had a psychotic episode as a first-year law student. Why doesn’t Rosen compare Laudor’s story to Elyn’s? Two Jews who developed schizophrenia and went to Yale Law School; one murdered his partner and the other won a MacArthur genius grant. This
