Mental

The story of Michael Laudor, as told by acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen, was heartrending. The author, Michael’s closest childhood and lifelong friend, wrote a story spanning 50 years which took me two weeks to finish. 

In terms of language prowess and intelligence, Michael Laudor could take pride in his encyclopaedia recall, like reading a book in one sitting without losing a word. He read faster than Rosen, remembered more, and processed information more quickly. 

The way Michael studied was not for the faint of hearts. His roommate had to move out because Michael never put his reading light out no matter how often he was asked or how late it got. He ended up inheriting a room of his own, which everyone in the college called “psycho singles.” 

During his first semester at Yale with Rosen, Michael had made a dive into a thorny debate with a Harvard professor who wanted Black parents to decide for themselves whether their kids got bused to majority-white schools or stayed close to home where, Michael warned, they would “suffer from the loss of an integrated environment.” Michael published a long letter in The New York Times defending the racial balance in public schools. Michael had superior intellectual ability. We took it for granted that Michael would rise to scholar status. It never occurred to us that he might one day became the man who needed to be judged as whether to be integrated or to be locked. 

He graduated from Yale Law School with summa cum laude honors despite suffering from schizophrenia. “Either you welcomed people with disabilities to the table,” he later wrote, “or you cast them out like lepers shunned in earlier times.” His story made us think again the way to help people with mental health problems. That’s something even bright guy like Michael doesn’t know the answer.