Many parents live with Rob Reiner and Tommy Lee Jones’ dire reality

Rob Reiner and Tommy Lee Jones came across as loving and devoted fathers, and they appeared to use their Hollywood wealth and privilege to give their children every opportunity to be happy and successful in life.

But the world has since learned that Reiner and Jones were unable to help troubled adult children whose whose mental health issues and addictions were so severe they led to tragedy. And, like a lot of parents whose adult children have such challenges, these very accomplished men apparently found themselves very limited in what they could do, even if they had the resources to give them the best treatment in the country.

According to Teresa Pasquini, a Bay Area advocate for such parents, the Reiner and Jones tragedies offer yet another reminder “of the suffering of families trying to gain treatment before tragedy for their loved ones.”

Reiner and his wife, Michele, were found stabbed to death in the bedroom of their Brentwood home on Dec. 14. Their alleged killer is their 32-year-old son Nick, who has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Nick Reiner, a once-aspiring screenwriter, had been open about his long history of drug abuse and was diagnosed in 2020 with schizoaffective disorder, a condition that can involves mania, depression and the delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking associated with schizophrenia, TMZ reported Thursday. He had been living in a guest house on his parents’ Brentwood estate, but was reportedly prescribed new medication that made him unstable.

Family violence involving a serious mental illness is not uncommon, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center. A  serious mental illness that is not properly treated has been associated with an estimated 29% of family homicides and with 67% of homicides in which children kill their parents, the center said.

Meanwhile, Jones is living through another tragedy that strikes parents with difficult children. His 34-year-old daughter, Victoria Jones, was found dead of a possible drug overdose. She died in a hallway at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco early in the morning on New Year’s Day.

In 2023, the Academy Award-winning Jones had petitioned for his daughter, a one-time actress, to be placed under a temporary guardianship while she was under a 14-day hold in a Marin County hospital, arguing she was in danger of “life-threatening conduct” and in need of drug rehabilitation, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. But for reasons not made clear in court records, “The Fugitive” actor later withdrew his petition after his daughter left the hospital with her husband, a member of a prominent Sonoma County wine family, and did not enter a rehab facility.

It’s not known if Victoria Jones also had a co-occurring mental illness but the past year had become increasingly turbulent for her. She was arrested three times in Napa and Santa Cruz counties, and faced pending misdemeanor cases in these jurisdictions, involving public intoxication, resisting arrest, possession of a controlled substance and domestic battery against her husband, according to the Daily Mail, the San Francisco Standard and the San Francisco Chronicle. She was reportedly staying at the luxury Nob Hill hotel to celebrate New Year’s Eve and had used cocaine the night she died, TMZ said.

In a statement following Victoria Jones’ death, the Jones family said: “We appreciate all of the kind words, thoughts, and prayers.”

It’s not yet known what interventions were tried Rob and Michele Reiner or by Jones and his current wife, Dawn, or his ex-wife, Kimberlea Cloughley, Victoria’s mother. But many parents of troubled adults face myriad obstacles in getting help for their children, said Pasquini, who is a former nine-year member of the Contra Costa County Mental Health Commission and who has long worked for changes in the state’s conservatorship laws. Pasquini has a 44-year-old son who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder when he was a teenager, is unable to care for himself and currently lives in a facility that she says keeps him safe, sober and stable.

But Pasquini, a member of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, spent years working through a “broken” mental health system in California that fails to build enough inpatient facilities or to provide adequate community-based treatment options. Parents also have had to navigate laws and policies, even under Gavin Newsom’s three-year-old Care Court, that can be confusing and that have long made it difficult for them to compel their children into treatment once they turn 18 and are considered autonomous adults. She said that mothers and fathers often are expected to wait until their children become “gravely disabled,” homeless or imprisoned before they can get medically necessary treatment.

“I belong to family groups where you have parents in their 70s or their 80s and they don’t know what to do,” Pasquini said, echoing the plight of the Reiners and of Jones and his ex-wife, who all are in their 70s. “They’re not going to stop caring for their kids. But then when something horrific happens (like the Reiner or Jones tragedies), there is the finger pointing: ‘Why didn’t they do this and why didn’t they do that?’ Or the parents are vilified if they try to force their kids into treatment.”

She added: “I had a friend say to me, that families have to crawl through glass to get the right care at the right time … and get cut all the way along the edges.”

Pasquini’s son spent 20 years being placed in multiple locked facilities, was arrested as a state hospital patient and almost sent to state prison before he was stabilized with proper treatment. Now, he’s living in a “really great” unlocked facility in Morgan Hill, she said, and his current medication has allowed him to understand that he needs help.

Mental advocates pointed to one misunderstood aspect of a serious mental illness, which complicates ideas of patient autonomy and choice. When a person is mentally decompensating, they often have a condition called anosognosia, which doesn’t allow them to recognize their symptoms or to understand they are ill. They may then reject treatment and perceive offers of concern as a threat. Now that Pasquini’s son has clarity about his condition, he accepts that he needs to be housed in a facility and recently expressed gratitude that she was his conservator.

Pasquini also knows that she and her husband, who are in their 70s, would not be equipped to have their son come home if he had to leave his current placement. If he returned home or living on his own, he might not stay on his medication, which helps him be his “kind, loving” self. Instead, he might go off his medication and start abusing street drugs again, leading to him becoming unstable and possibly suicidal or aggressive.

For the parents who don’t have conservatorship or who can’t get their children placed in a treatment facility, they often become “the asylum” for their children, Pasquini said. That seems to be what happened with Rob and Michele Reiner, with their son living with them.

Nick Reiner had previously talked about being resistant to treatment, revealing in 2016 interviews that he had cycled through 17 facilities before he was in his early 20s. That year, Nick Reiner and his director father were promoting a movie, “Being Charlie,” that they made together and that was based on Nick’s real-life addiction and its affect on their family. In those interviews, Nick and Rob Reiner opened up about their conflicts around Reiner and his wife insisting that Nick go to rehab or not come home. So Nick Reiner left home but what followed, he said, was a descent into heroin use and homelessness.

It’s not known if Nick Reiner continued to write or tried another line of work but he kept using drugs while his mental health apparently worsened. He revealed in a 2018 podcast that he once destroyed his family’s guest house while “spun out on uppers, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Before their deaths, Rob and Michele Reiner had become increasingly anguished about their son’s condition, with Michele saying, “we’ve tried everything,” TMZ reported. The couple also had reportedly expressed concern to friends about leaving him home alone, which is the reason they asked if he could accompany them to a Christmas Party at Conan O’Brien’s house the night before they were found dead.

Nick Reiner reportedly made other party guests feel uneasy, and he and his father got into an “intense” argument about his behavior, leading some guests to wonder if they should call 911, the Daily Mail reported. Before leaving the party, Reiner reportedly told friends he was “was petrified” that Nick could hurt him.

Violence by family members is one issue that people in the mental health community are reluctant to talk about, Pasquini said. That’s largely because they don’t want to bolster the stigma that people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder pose a danger to society. While most people with serious mental illness are not violent, Pasquni said the Reiner tragedy shows “It’s time to get honest about the potential for violence” when a serious mental illness in not adequately treated, especially because of the risk posed to families.