We Didn’t Replace What We Tore Down in the 1970’s

I’ve been thinking a lot about the tragedy involving Rob Reiner and his son, but not for the reason most people are talking about it.

This isn’t about celebrity gossip or second-guessing parents who lived through something most of us pray we never will.

This subject isn’t abstract for me. I’ve watched it play out inside my own family. My sister struggled for years, and like so many families, we were caught between caring deeply and being legally helpless. We could see what was happening long before things spiraled. We knew when she was slipping. But knowing and being able to act are two very different things in today’s system. That experience never leaves you, and it shapes how you see stories like the Reiners’—not with judgment, but with a clear understanding of how limited a family’s options can become.

In fact, before anything else is said, it matters to say this clearly: by every public account, Rob and Michele Reiner tried to help their son. They sought treatment. They listened to professionals. They spent time, money, and emotional energy trying to get him well. They weren’t absent. They weren’t indifferent. They weren’t pretending nothing was wrong.

If anything, what stood out to me most after I researched this case is how closely the Reiners followed the script our culture has been promoting for decades. When their son struggled, they did what parents are told to do. They turned to the mental-health system as it exists today. They placed him in treatment programs. They relied on doctors, counselors, and specialists. They trusted credentials and professional guidance.

Rob Reiner even helped bring his son’s experience into the open through the film Being Charlie, a deeply personal project centered on addiction, relapse, and the toll those cycles take on families. That is not denial. That is engagement at the deepest level.

And yet, despite all of that effort, they still ran into the same hard boundary so many parents face once a child becomes an adult in the eyes of the law. Concern does not equal authority. Love does not equal control. Resources do not equal the legal ability to act. At a certain point, parents are told their role is limited to encouragement, advice, and hope.

That’s the part of this story that deserves more attention than it’s getting.

There was a time in this country when people suffering from severe mental illness or chronic addiction could be institutionalized — sometimes temporarily, sometimes for long periods — to protect themselves, their families, and society. That system was far from perfect. In some cases, it was deeply flawed and even abusive. Those failures were real and deserved to be exposed.

One of the most powerful forces in that exposure was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The film didn’t just entertain; it reshaped public opinion. It made institutional care synonymous with cruelty, authority synonymous with abuse, and confinement something to be feared above all else. The message landed, and it stuck.

But we stopped the conversation there.

Instead of reforming long-term mental-health care, we dismantled it. We closed institutions and never built a humane replacement for people who cannot reliably care for themselves. We replaced long-term supervision with short hospital stays. We replaced treatment with discharge paperwork. We replaced responsibility with legal process.

Today, unless an adult is an immediate and provable danger at that exact moment, families are told there is little they can do. You can’t insist on long-term treatment. You can’t require supervision. You can’t keep someone somewhere safe simply because you know, through years of experience, that they are deteriorating.

Repeated relapses don’t change that.

Homelessness often doesn’t change that.

Clear decline frequently doesn’t change that.

For decades, many families were advised by professionals that “tough love” was the answer — that withdrawing support would force recovery. Parents followed that advice in good faith because they trusted the system. Some later questioned it. Some regretted it. Not because they didn’t care, but because the outcome didn’t match the theory.

That doesn’t make those parents negligent.

It makes them trapped in a system that confuses autonomy with abandonment.

We say we are protecting civil liberties, yet we tolerate untreated mental illness and addiction playing out on sidewalks across the country. We say we are being compassionate, yet we leave families powerless while loved ones unravel in public view. We dismantled institutions in the name of humanity, then replaced them with tents, jails, and emergency rooms.

If One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were made today, it wouldn’t be set in a hospital ward. It would be set under an overpass or in a tent city. The cruelty wouldn’t come from locked doors. It would come from indifference — wrapped in good intentions and legal language.

The lesson of the Reiner tragedy isn’t that parents don’t try hard enough. It’s that trying is no longer enough. We’ve stripped families of authority without giving the state meaningful responsibility in return.

We didn’t just close mental hospitals.

We closed the space between compassion and containment.

Until we find the courage to rebuild humane, long-term care for people who cannot reliably care for themselves, families will continue to hear the same devastating sentence:

“There’s nothing you can do.”

That isn’t progress.

It’s abandonment with better language.