I truly feel sorry that Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in cold blood by their own son. It doesn’t matter to me that I did not agree with Reiner’s politics.
Besides being a severe drug addict, Reiner’s son had been in drug rehab some 18 times in his life. It makes one wonder if the therapy protocols were any good or if he was, in fact, incorrigible. I was surprised that Reiner and his wife practiced tough love to some extent as they allowed their son to be homeless at some point in his life because of his poor choices and coping skills. I have spoken to several recovered drug addicts; they believe that hitting rock bottom was what saved them.
However, instead of hitting rock bottom, things got worse; it has been reported that Reiner’s son had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia. This mental disease is extremely difficult to treat. Supposedly, his doctors were adjusting his meds, and it made him worse. A significant number of the drugs used to treat mentally ill people can make them violent including inflicting self-harm on themselves and harming others. Obviously, not all people diagnosed as mentally ill are violent. But some are and their arrest records prove it. In fact, a significant number of school shooters and other mass murderers were on such drugs.
This brings up a stunning failure in our society as it relates to the mentally ill with long arrest records and little to no time served. That is, we don’t know how to deal with these ticking time bombs. Rob Reiner is reported to have told several friends that he was afraid his son would harm him and his wife.
Yet, what could he do about his fear?
We have seen one murder after another in our society, often in broad daylight and in public places, wherein somebody with a very long history of mental illness and criminal acts has been allowed to roam free on our streets creating one victim after another. Iryna Zarutska comes to mind. She was the Ukrainian refugee murdered on a light rail line in North Carolina by a suspect who had been arrested some 14 times in his life and who had served time in prison. According to his mother, around the time he was in prison he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His parents tried to get him some help, but our system, except for some temporary holds, won’t force anybody into treatment until after they have committed a heinous crime. This is a nightmare for the families of the mentally ill, not to mention the victims of their crimes.
Drug Abuse as a Public Health and Safety Issue
It has been reported that the night before Reiner and his wife were murdered, they were at a Hollywood party. It was obvious to several of the guests that Reiner’s son was out of control. These guests wanted to call in cops and mental health professionals and have him temporarily committed but supposedly the host – former late-night TV comic Conan O’Brien – refused. Reiner is dead because of the recalcitrance of the partygoers to call the authorities. Reiner is also dead because we don’t have the will to deal with the mentally ill unless and until they commit such crimes. We need to revisit institutionalizing these people before more victims are hurt, or worse, murdered.
Another issue we need to deal with is how is it that our society is producing so many people that have mental health issues. As it turns out, just as we don’t force any type of institutionalization on people dealing with severe mental health problems, neither do we treat drug users as criminals. Yet, drug use is surely a public health and safety issue.
The following charts are taken from this website
This chart demonstrates that a significant source of mental illness has to do with drug use. Furthermore, the prevalence of mental illness is also a function of age, including an age rife with experimentation and fraught with obvious lifelong consequences:
It is painfully obvious that people who are experimenting with, or routinely taking drugs, are playing a game of Russian roulette with their lives and their loved ones, along with members of the public who end up having to deal with the ramifications and consequences of their actions and choices. Our society is paying a steep price for its pursuit of tolerance.
Will we ever learn?
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An excellent piece, Andy. Two things I’d like to add. The first: Michael Shellenberger did a terrific talk on the subject here https://x.com/shellenberger/status/2002494700906033359. One thing that Shellenberger brings up is that Reiner himself could/should have used his Dem party clout to get Newsom to enforce laws that would protect both insane people and those they might harm. The second thing I’d like to add: we had an incident in October in Goleta that underscores the failure of our system to protect citizens from violence by mentally ill people. At the Ralph’s market in Magnolia Plaza, a mentally ill man tried to attack another man in the parking lot and stabbed the man’s dog. We knew about this man, who seemed to be homeless. We live near the open More Mesa field. In May, a young man knocked at our door, begging us to help him get his girlfriend to safety. This man was violently threatening them and the guy at our door had hidden his girlfriend and run (he was very fit) to our street for help. My husband helped get his girlfriend to safety as he asked the man to file a police report. The man and his girlfriend both refused. We called the police. They did a thorough search, but couldn’t find the mentally ill man.
Cut to October at Ralph’s when the mentally ill man attacked the other man, who wrestled the knife out of his dog and ran into Ralph’s. The mentally ill man followed and during the attempt to arrest him, the police shot and killed him. We shop at Magnolia. Only one hour before, my husband was parked right at the spot where the mentally ill man made the attack. It could have been my husband. And it could have been me, because often we park right there and I stay in our car with the window down while my husband goes into Ralph’s. I could have been stabbed in the neck by that man with no ability to defend myself.
I greatly resent the fact that this has never been adequately reported on in the Santa Barbara media. It has never been raised that this should not be happening in Santa Barbara. It should have opened questions about how to deal with our violent mentally ill people. Instead, there was a lot of sympathy for the mentally ill guy in our local Next Door and Reddit forums.
I feel sorry for the mentally ill. That’s why I want for there to be a change in the stupid “tolerant” ways in which our Democrat government is dealing — or rather, enabling violence from people who are not in control of their actions. It’s cruel to the souls of the mentally ill as well as their victims. As a psychiatrist friend of mine said to me “It’s definitely a big mess — I think there’s a lot of people who would be better off living in a supervised institution and that it would be better for the community as a whole as well.”
In the last graph it appears that the incidence of mental illness was relatively stable until 2016 - 2017 when it began to increase and then in 2020 it appears that the slope or rate of increase in mental illness increased further. Beginning in 2016 the anti-Trump rhetoric increased and people were told that a candidate and eventual president was Hitler, going to put blacks in chains, has policies that are a threat to democracy, would accelerate global warming to the destruction of life on earth, etc. The increase in 2020 corresponds with the covid scam and the mass vaccination with an unsafe and ineffective therapy. I think it is enough to make anyone crazy.