Reflections on the Reiner family tragedy
Probably all of us know a family or families where lives have been upended by drug addiction – probably not as dramatically as the Reiners’ lives were, where the endpoint was apparently matricide and patricide – but badly enough, and with suffering enough. Sometimes it’s as it was with one old friend of mine who struggled for decades with the addiction of a beloved child and finally ended up winning the battle, for now. But only for now. As they say, one step at a time. Sometimes, as with a relative of mine to whom I’m not especially close, that same struggle was sadly lost with the death of that child from drugs.
In all the cases I know, the family tried almost everything under the sun to help that child get free: countless programs, rehabs, tough love, not-so-tough love, logical consequences such as jail time, all sorts of therapy, you name it. I think it’s easy, so very easy, to stand on the sidelines and give advice or judgment as to why it didn’t work out: I would have done this; I would have done that. Maybe it even worked for your child when you did it, but that doesn’t mean it would have worked for that other child.
I think it’s wrong to imagine we can say what causes a child – or anyone, for that matter – to become addicted to drugs, to spiral down and down and down, to come up again only to spiral down again, and to ultimately succumb to the darkest of forces or to finally emerge in the light.
I know that when I read the story of the Reiner parents’ attempts to help their son Nick, I felt I recognized heroic efforts to save him. It wasn’t enough, and maybe nothing would have been enough. Maybe he was a sort of sociopath from the start. Maybe not. Maybe family fame had something to do with it. Maybe not. I only know enough to say that I don’t know.
The survivors – the Reiners’ biological daughter and other son, as well as their adopted daughter (Reiner’s ex-wife Penny Marshall’s child from another marriage) – will almost certainly have a very tough road ahead of them, and I hope they get whatever help they need. As for the alleged murderer, their son Nick, he may finally kick his habit while incarcerated. Perhaps then the full weight of what he’s done will sink in. Would it be worse for him to get the death penalty, or to have to live with the knowledge?
A terrible tragedy.
It seems to me that in such a situation where every available means is used to pull the person out, but they keep going down, then the most probable diagnosis is that there’s something organically wrong in the brain. Seems a very fruitful area of research for neurologists to pursue.
Forty years ago my sister, addicted to alcohol and coke, picked up her white chip at an AA meeting and never used again. She prayed a lot and stuck with the program.
Numerous attempts were made to save my mother, brother and half-sister from substance abuse. Some fast, some slow, they died.
I had my problems, but never got into trouble that way. I don’t know why. I was smart enough to stay away from pills and powders.
If there were some magic bullet against drug addiction that worked for everybody, there wouldn’t be any. Or any other pernicious habit either I suppose.
If I remember right, in The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe said the test pilots who died were blamed for their own deaths by the test pilots who survived, and this was their way of coping with the fact that none of the pilots could possibly know what it was that was going to kill them or know that there would be anything they could do about it when and if something went wrong.
I think the impulse to blame parents for children’s drug addiction might come from the same source, that there’s just much less control over those outcomes than anyone is comfortable accepting.
I have a child who suffered for years, mostly in denial. Thankfully, she now seems to have matured enough to want to free herself from her addictions and improve her mental health, and has engaged with the resources necessary to help her recover. I am encouraged by her commitment and improvement to date. I am fortunate she undertook this based on her own realization of where she was headed. The previous times I had tried to intervene were largely unsuccessful.
This is definitely a circumstance where unless you are in those specific shoes, you cannot judge….EXCEPT to say that going over the cliff with the addict (mentally ill, whether one is by organic or consequential origin) is often the result of enabling. Sadly our society is structured to make it very difficult to disengage from the madness. I have given out at least 25 copies of My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill,by Clayton E. Cramer. Because of the impact on our society and how our taxes are utilized in “answer” to this huge problem, this book should be required reading of every voting citizen. We have a history of doing better and the direction over the last couple decades has been decidely wrong.
I think there is a non-parental aspect that cannot be controlled, al la your comment about the problem was the child was sociopath, with the drug addiction a symptom. The interview blurbs I read (where he was interviewed) showed he really didn’t want to become sober, and didn’t care about the results if he didn’t.
So I consider myself lucky that I have no family members or even friends that ever had any abuse problems, and for my own kids we encouraged health and sports so they grew up avoiding even soda and junk foods along with drugs of any kind, sort of a MAHA a quarter century early. But I attribute the results partly to luck and genes and not my awesome parenting.
I’m also going to make a comment that Reiner’s outward hatred and over the top hostility (remember he called all republicans nazis and racists and so on) was a reflection of his self-hatred of being unable to control what he thought he should control (his family), so he pointed that hatred outward to others. Plus all the social media and mud stirring provided a distraction from his disaster at home. Something to think about when you see others venting hatred on society or a segment of society at large.
Yes I agree a terrible thing.
Thirty years ago, I read an article written by a woman from a very wealthy family. Her brother died, froze to death, homeless on the streets of Manhattan. He had suffered from schizophrenia.
The article was more a cris de coeur: Her family loved him, and had the resources to help him. The problem was, he’d get into a cycle: He’d be hospitalized, get stabilized, get released, live at home for awhile, move out, get off his medications, move onto the streets… They couldn’t force him to be institutionalized against his will: He was not considered “a danger to himself or others” once he was stabilized. They couldn’t force him to stay at home. It didn’t matter that once he was released, he would eventually stop using his medication. And because he wasn’t actively threatening suicide or self harm, he wasn’t considered a threat to himself — even though once he went off his medications, we would start living on the streets of Manhattan.
A lot of addicts have similar issues: They really need to be institutionalized. I don’t mean “lock ’em up and throw away the key.” I mean long term, full time, residential psych hospitalization. The old State Hospitals were beautiful campuses and once provided great long term treatment of people who full time needed residential care. Between “deinstitutionalization” as a desirable goal, and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” we as a society have done huge disservice to the mentally ill who needed that.
Well said. Withering Truth.
At least in any other ordinary conflict, in addition to the pain of the loser, there is offsetting solace and joy to the winner.
Here—there’s now none of that. Only the long-term future of Nick may find in something redemptive.
Death like this leaves an emotional hole for the sane survivors. The one important b leasing is that the gaping maw and raw hurt shrinks, slowly. One day.
I’ve seen parents behave in an unsalutary fashion in these circumstances, but I couldn’t tell you that was decisive. It seems to me people pleased by vice can be very willful and will blithely motor past all sorts of indicators telling them they’re doing the wrong thing. Nick Reiner seems to have been exceptionally persistent.
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I suspect at the beginning, Hollywood culture, Hollywood social networks, and an excess of spending money as an adolescent may have been tinder which was decisive. He grew up in a 10,000 sq foot home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. His father owned a second home in Malibu. Recalling that Bing Crosby was twice married and had two sets of children about 25 years apart. His older children were a disaster and his younger roughly normal. His youngest son said his father made a point in his later years of living out in the country in northern California to keep his children away from Hollywood. It’s not difficult to find people more sensible than Reiner who failed with their children in that matrix, albeit not as spectacularly as this. Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne would be an example; Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan, and Nancy Reagan would be another.
IMO blaming parents or an organic brain defect are far too simple for a complex phenomenon.
I see addiction more as the brain working as designed in the short-term but involving a cascade of factors combined with some genetic vulnerabilities which don’t work out well in the long-term. I.e. it’s complicated.
Drugs are great for positive reinforcement so one repeats behaviors which reduce pain or uncertainty for short-term survival. Unfortunately one can become stuck in that loop. Genetic vulnerabilities, early trauma, drug tolerance, withdrawal, and environment can all work to lock in addiction.
Drugs can easily become a trap for humans, a pattern which takes great effort to overcome. Finding a someone or something to blame is insufficient IMO and doesn’t help the addict.
Lee Also, I learned from a (very liberal) friend whose son had it that there is nothing that can be done for schizophrenics. They have to be hospitalized and as you point out, almost never can be. Yes, society has done a disservice to all involved.
In particular, the sister who lived nearby and was closest to the parents and to Nick will suffer terribly.
Mutatis Mutandis, this is absolutely not true. There are good and effective medicines for schizophrenia. They have relatively small and benign side effects. But schizophrenia is relatively common, approximately one percent of the population or over 3 million people in the United States. The problem is the fraction of people will not take the medicine. And others who self medicate with narcotics.
Many of the so-called homeless are actually mentally ill with schizophrenia. The leftist states like California have adopted what they call a “housing first” approach. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead of putting them in facilities where they could get therapy both psychotherapy and medical, they put them up in apartments where they are free to go out again on the street. But this enables the politicians to pay off their contributors to build these apartments.
I do not know whether this was the problem with the Reiners’ son. But if so, they paid a terrible price for not insisting on adequate therapy.
https://www.amazon.com/Center-Cannot-Hold-Journey-Through/dp/1401309445
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Back-Schizophrenia-Memoir/dp/1510724958?
Bob, I disagree that the side effects are relatively small and benign. How would you like a little lifelong tardive dyskinesia with your antipsychotics, Mr. or Ms. Schizophrenic? I witnessed that in my own mother (given one of them for psychotic depression, not schizophrenia) and her brother. They also often cause weight gain and can cause diabetes.
Marisa, the side effects you are mentioning are mainly with the first generation medicines. Later generation medicines like olanzapine, have many fewer side effects. That being said, even the first generation medicines were a miracle cure to avoid a lifetime of psychosis. Would your relatives have been better off not taking the medicines?
I am also not making light of the effects of schizophrenia. It Is a terrible illness. It first shows up in young adults, earlier for men than women. It seemingly takes these young people in the prime of their lives. And MM is right that there is no “cure”. The best that can be done is to manage the disease and reduce its effects.
All medicines have side effects. There are no magic bullets that only cure without harming anything else. We have to balance the good against the bad.
Sad .
There is a program in my area that has a resident for homeless people and such. The men live on the site and have to give up their phones for the duration of the stages of the program. I am not aware of any judge making these people go there – as far as I know it’s completely voluntary but structured. They have a chapel on site and lots of religious training. On Sundays they are taken to various churches. Basically the staff that is on duty that day takes them to the staff members own church. Sometimes they come to my church and I sit with one of the guys. The program is also is involved with The Celebrate Recovery program that meets weekly at our church. After the guys complete the resident program they are allowed to live at the site for a couple of years I think while they work and get reestablished financially.
I grew up in fairly bad circumstances. I realized pretty early on that the only thing I had going for me was the fact that I was somewhat above average in intelligence; I certainly was not going to make it in life on my looks, or my charm, or my athletic abilities. And I wasn’t going the risk the one thing that I could use to make a good life for myself. My mother’s father was an alcoholic, and I was taught that even a few drinks could send you down the path of destruction. So, I completely abstained from alcohol and pot (which was the only drug somewhat available in those days). I never touched a drop of alcohol until I was drafted at the age of 22, and figured I was going to die in Viet Nam anyway, so what the hell… In the Army, I started drinking, and found out that I REALLY liked alcohol. I drank pretty heavily off and on for the next few years, then realized that I had better get it under control, and I did. Today I have a strict limit of two drinks a day, usually only one, and I can maintain that. I think it is a good thing for me that I did not start drinking until I was at least somewhat mature, or I would probably be a full-blown alcoholic.
It almost sounds as if the Reiner’s son had a psychotic episode.
This can be brought on by excessive marijuana use – which is legal in California.
I also find it interesting that he first went to rehab at 15. 15! WTH?
I wonder if he was diagnosed as ADHD and put on drugs as a child. I saw this done to my nephew. A perfectly normal high energy boy. It’s criminal what was done to him and so many like him in our over feminized education system. He spent his teens and twenties fighting addiction. He finally beat his addiction thanks be to God.