The question of good or evil is religious; the question of right or wrong is legal; the question of mental illness or fitness is medical. When these three authorities and their different modes of thinking intersect, chaos tends to ensue.
These questions carry renewed urgency with the scheduled arraignment of Nick Reiner on Monday.
Nick Reiner is accused of stabbing his parents, Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, to death in December. How his condition, character and legal liability relate may particularly vex those who will determine whether he could receive the death penalty, another punishment, or some kind of supportive, restrictive care.
Nick Reiner is a focus of public interest because of his parents. His case is hardly unique; it may well, however, set precedent: perhaps legal precedent, but also a precedent in the public imagination. The story the larger community develops about Nick Reiner and his parents will both reflect and determine to a certain degree society’s insight into and compassion for severe mental illness.
The way this is resolved will be up to a judge and jury whose decision-making will be primarily based on law rather than morality or medicine. Nick’s fate may hinge on how a court assesses his ability to have distinguished right from wrong at the time of his rampage. Evaluation could find that he was psychotic yet capable of understanding the ramifications of what he was doing. Court-appointed forensic psychiatrists and other mental health experts retained by the defense may argue that he could not draw that distinction. Determining guilt or innocence is ultimately left to jurisprudence.
A judge and jury’s impressions of someone in the courtroom, what they hear from the doctors and other witnesses, and their pre-existing views about mental illness will all factor into their conclusions about the inner workings of someone else’s mind. Those living with severe mental illness are often looking out a fogged window, but how fogged is it — and what are the obligations and permissions attached to clinical confusion?
Psychosis and mental clarity do not lie on either side of a bright line; delusions haunt people who do not meet diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, and moral compunctions remain active in many who do. Psychosis is a complex spectrum, a blanket term for a multitude of personal slippage from strict coherence.
Assuming Nick Reiner was psychotic at the time of his alleged crimes, as has been implied, how can we retrospectively judge his level of confusion? Schizophrenia is not an invasive illness that can be expelled like a bacterium; it is a nebulous category of disorders of the mind that can elude amelioration despite all best efforts.
Our understanding of the brain is far more primitive than our understanding of any other organ, and that primitivism makes it nearly impossible to determine what was going on inside Nick Reiner. We naturally feel compassion for his parents — but too often not for Nick Reiner himself. His suffering must have been terrible; it must be terrible right now.
Rob Reiner was a beloved public figure and had fought hard for the general good and the good of his son. His death saddens a community far beyond those who knew him personally. Some of the fury against his son reflects the public misapprehension that those with privilege should be capable of self-control.
In a country where the best medical care is expensive, many presume that the wealthy have all their remedial needs met. Wealth and social position afford advantages. But they do not delimit anguish.
The public’s presumption that Nick Reiner may have had some kind of choice reflects a poor understanding of the inner lives of the mentally ill; Nick himself said that his problems were always “more than” the addiction that was long reported in the media. If he had not hoped to triumph over his problems, he would not have gone to rehab nearly 20 times, as he did.
The question is not whether one can love the sinner and hate the sin, but how one lives out that apparent contradiction in practical terms. One can love someone who is sick and hate the sickness, love the addict and hate the addiction, persist in hope even when all evidence points toward futility. All people contain contradictions and all love is ambivalent. Repressing such inconsistency damages both parent and child. But people in psychosis are often incapable of nuance.
As someone who last year experienced medication-induced psychosis, I am intimately acquainted with anosognosia, the symptomatic belief among psychotic people that they have no illness. Convinced I finally had discovered great truths, I wrote and said things that have mortified me since the psychosis passed. Despite having spent decades as one of the “experts,” I was helpless when my mind decompensated; neither my knowledge of psychosis nor my belief in basic values survived the disruption.
No one can completely fathom what psychosis is if he has not endured it himself. I am grateful that most of the damage I did during my single, three-week psychosis was verbal rather than physical.
I knew Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner slightly, but enough to know they were visionary idealists who loved their son intensely, even as they were profoundly frustrated by his challenges.
I imagine that had they survived, Rob and Michele would be more heartbroken than furious. I do not think they would have wanted to see their son castigated as he has been. Since his arrest, Nick has regularly been referred to on social media as a “nepo baby,” “pure evil,” someone who “chose” addiction when he could have lived out a high-flown version of the American dream.
Even in conversation with me, a person they had dined with only a few times, Rob and Michele Reiner recognized the depth of their son’s suffering as a call for their own compassion, and they recognized that Nick’s behavior was often outside his control. To what degree his delusions were occasioned by drug use, and to what degree that drug use was a byproduct of a troubled mind, is unknowable. The two fed on each other; they cannot be separated.
Nick Reiner is reported to have struggled with a schizoaffective disorder. The law proposes that he either knew, or could not know, right from wrong. But psychotic logic does not translate this way. No one can know what Nick would have been like without psychosis; perhaps he was a “bad” person or perhaps a “good” one. In either case, his crime is itself his punishment; the horror of awakening to one’s own psychotic acts exceeds any third-party punishment.
Under the Trump administration, aggressive “justice” and judgmental positions that ignore scientific expertise are in fashion; mental health has been grossly marginalized. I hope that Nick Reiner’s case, whatever we may learn of it, is not prejudiced by this unfortunate shift. In this case, neither Christian nationalism nor vengeful brutality will serve the American people well.
Shrewd insight into the complexity of the brain may be Nick Reiner’s best ally. Let us hope the judge and jury can take that on board. His case will be heard in California, where, one can hope, understanding of human suffering can still sometimes outstrip rageful cruelty.
Nick Reiner’s parents were not vengeful people; no one need be vengeful on their behalf.
Andrew Solomon is the author of “Far From the Tree” and “The Noonday Demon” and is writing a book about youth suicide.
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