2024/08/02 Well! I started out extremely bored with this book, but was completely engaged by the 1/3 mark. Rosen writes about schizophrenia as it affects the suffering individual, their friends and family, and societal as a whole with admirable empathy’s and curiosity. I’ve thought a lot about the difficult decisions surrounding involuntary treatment for mental illness given my personal history with the pandemic subject, and Rosen articulates so many of the tensions between respecting someone’s independence / autonomy and preventing harm to themselves and others. I particularly resonated (sometimes uncomfortably) with the discussion of the specific challenges that arise when someone with a serious mental illness is outwardly “high-functioning,” and able to intellectualize their own pathology while internally drowning in their own mind — and the subsequent crisis when the facade breaks down. While I don’t have familiarity with schizophrenia, my own demons are similarly characterized by anosognosia— the belief that one is not ill — and my ongoing pursuits of higher education with a mental disability mirrored many of the experiences that Rosen explains his friend had at Yale Law School. I have lots more to think about with this book!