Rosen’s debut novel anticipates The Best Minds. Both feature boundary-transgressing psychiatrists, young people with mental illness, and a central character who investigates the limits of psychiatry in an attempt to help them. The two books mirror each other in structure and theme. Here’s his Dr. Flek, one of the great psychiatrists in fiction, on how some mental illnesses become cultural phenomena: “Polio has been wiped out in this country, but the number of attractive women who hate themselves–well, that’s something of an epidemic. Hollywood culture is universal culture now. Everyone wants to step out of life and into the flat perfections of a movie screen. My own wish to drown was not so different from the desire those girls had to leave their real lives behind, to receive new names and wardrobes and perfectly scripted lines. Most people don’t want to die, but they don’t want to live either.”