Once again, the familiar script is being rolled out.
After the killing of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner by their son Nick, the public is being offered a tidy explanation: mental illness, a medication change, an unfortunate side effect. Headlines reassure us that the real culprit was chemistry—something that went wrong inside Nick’s brain in the final weeks.
Anything will do.
Anything except looking at his upbringing.
The Convenience of a Diagnosis
Labeling Nick Reiner as schizophrenic and attributing the tragedy to a medication switch serves a very specific function: it removes responsibility from the emotional environment in which he was formed.
Mental illness becomes a modern equivalent of “bad luck.” Medication becomes the scapegoat. Psychiatry becomes the final authority.
And parents—especially powerful, admired parents—remain untouched.
This is not new. Alice Miller described this maneuver decades ago.
When violence erupts, society rushes to explanations that protect the sanctity of the family. Diagnoses are safer than childhood truths. Pills are safer than questions about neglect, emotional abandonment, fear, and denial.
What Medication Cannot Explain
Medication can amplify, dampen, or destabilize symptoms. It cannot create, from nothing, a lifelong inner structure of terror, rage, dependency, and dissociation.
To claim that a few weeks of altered medication caused this outcome is to ignore everything that came before:
a childhood marked by hyperactivity and constant management
a family rule of “give him what he wants”
chronic appeasement replacing real emotional contact
fear of upsetting the child instead of helping him feel
adulthood defined by dependency, repeated rehabs, and failure to achieve autonomy
Medication did not build that internal world. It only interacted with it.
Spoiling as Emotional Neglect
Alice Miller was explicit about this:
When lack of authentic communication, warmth, and emotional presence is covered by spoiling, the child cannot recognize neglect. The pain is denied, buried, and stored in the body.
The child survives by repression.
The adult pays the price.
Nick Reiner’s upbringing, as now described by insiders—constant vigilance, appeasement, avoidance of confrontation—fits this pattern precisely. His distress was managed, not understood. His rage was contained, not integrated.
And what is denied does not disappear.
Why “Mental Illness” Is the Perfect Alibi
Mental illness explanations perform several cultural services:
They individualize what is relational
They turn history into pathology
They silence questions about parents
A diagnosis says: Something is wrong with him.
A childhood inquiry says: Something happened to him.
Only one of those threatens society’s most sacred illusions.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Was Forced to Forget
As Miller wrote, violent acting-out is not random. It is reenactment.
People who were emotionally threatened early in life often threaten others later in the same way—not consciously, but compulsively. This knowledge is not stored in memory alone; it is stored in the nervous system.
Medication may alter perception, but it does not erase that stored knowledge.
If anything, when repression weakens—through stress, medication changes, or emotional destabilization—the buried material can surge to the surface with catastrophic force.
The tragedy, then, is not that Nick Reiner was treated.
The tragedy is that he was treated without truth.
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Why was an adult man in his thirties still so dependent, so emotionally unintegrated, so unable to live autonomously?
Why was fear—on both sides—still structuring the relationship between parents and son?
Why was no one willing, decades earlier, to say: Something is terribly wrong here?
Because asking those questions would implicate not just one family, but a culture.
Pills Are Faster Than Truth
Facing childhood reality takes time, courage, and the willingness to shatter comforting myths. Prescribing medication is faster. Explaining violence as a chemical imbalance is faster. Declaring the case tragic-but-inexplicable is faster.
But fast explanations do not prevent repetition.
They guarantee it.
A Final Word
Nick Reiner did not need better medication alone.
He needed what Alice Miller described again and again:
help tolerating painful feelings
permission to feel anger toward the real sources of pain
support in becoming autonomous rather than dependent
By blaming pills and diagnoses instead of childhood truth, society once again protects parents, institutions, and illusions—while ensuring that the next tragedy is already incubating.
This essay was written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) as a tool for reflection, synthesis, and articulation. The responsibility for the ideas and interpretations expressed here remains my own.
A Personal Vignette: Portugal, Children, and the Roots of Violence
This pattern is not theoretical for me. I witnessed it firsthand in Portugal in 2003, when I returned to warn my family and community about the dangers of spanking and emotional coercion. One afternoon, while babysitting my niece’s four‑year‑old daughter, we played a game where she pretended to be the mother, and I was the child. When I did not obey her, she spanked me and called me a “bad girl.” When I asked where she learned this, she answered simply: from her parents.
When I told her she was not bad—that she was a little child and that the violence done to her was not her fault—she burst into tears and insisted, “You don’t understand. Sometimes I am very bad.” That sentence alone reveals how early shame and self‑hatred are implanted. Later that same day, on a dangerous street near Porto, she repeatedly let go of my hand, testing whether I would respond with violence. I felt the impulse to spank her rise in me—because that is what was done to me as a child—but I did not act on it. I sat with her, explained the danger, waited with her feelings, and refused to move until she could choose safety herself. We walked home peacefully.
That moment matters. It shows that violence is not inevitable. But it also shows how much patience, awareness, and emotional work are required to interrupt the compulsion to repeat. Most adults do not do this work. They medicate, excuse, deny, or moralize instead.
When AI Becomes the New Scapegoat
The same avoidance is now playing out in a newer form: parents blaming artificial intelligence for tragedies rooted in long‑standing emotional neglect. I wrote previously about the heartbreaking case of a young man who died by suicide, after which his parents chose to sue OpenAI, blaming ChatGPT for his death. Once again, the focus is displaced outward—onto technology, algorithms, and external influence—rather than inward, toward the emotional climate in which that young man grew up.
Just as with Nick Reiner, the question is not whether a trigger existed. Of course it did. The question is why a fragile psyche was already primed to collapse. Tools do not create despair; they can only interact with what already exists. When a child grows up without being seen, heard, or emotionally protected, their despair will eventually attach itself to something—religion, drugs, ideology, technology, or a person. Destroy the object, and another will take its place.
Blaming ChatGPT today serves the same psychological function as blaming medication, drugs, or “mental illness” yesterday. It allows parents—and society—to avoid the most terrifying question of all: What did this child live with before the crisis? Until that question is faced, the tragedies will continue, and the scapegoats will simply change names.
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