Making Sense of the Senseless

Mental health is a delicate balance — time, therapy, medication management, and the unending support of loved ones all working in fragile coordination.

Illustration by Riley Levine

It’s never one-size-fits-all. It’s a sliding scale, shaped by circumstance and severity. But when someone you love struggles with mental illness, the instinct is simple: you take care of them. You love them. You nurture them.

Young men in this country are suffering. That is an absolute fact.

Many of us — especially Millennials, and likely those who followed — grew up in environments where bullying was normalized, even among friends. Weakness was a liability. Emotion was a target.

“Faggot.”

“Pussy.”

Sometimes it was verbal. Sometimes it was physical — a punch between periods, thrown by someone trying to look tough for an audience.

We saw it every day.

I don’t know if previous generations experienced this differently, but I do know what made ours distinct: the internet.

Catfishing didn’t begin as an MTV show — it started as cruel jokes on AOL Instant Messenger. MySpace Top 8s turned into a public ranking system. Bullying didn’t just follow you home, it lived there.

I can’t speak for everyone. This is anecdotal, rooted in what I lived and what I watched happen around me. But looking back, it’s staggering how invisible the damage felt at the time. An entire generation of young men never taught how to process emotion — let alone express it to one another.

So you isolate.

You protect yourself.

You look for a partner, someone safe, and you build a small world where you’re allowed to feel without fear — without being accused of femininity or softness, without reliving the anxiety of being exposed.

You work. You provide. You learn to protect. You build a life and start becoming a man.

But the past doesn’t disappear. It waits.

Old insecurities resurface. Unprocessed trauma floats back to the surface — bullying, loss, grief. And now you’re responsible for others. There’s no time to sort through it. No space to fall apart.

So you press on.

But what happens when it becomes too much?

What happens when you want to heal?

Men are told to show emotion, but we were never taught how to express it safely or constructively. So when it finally emerges, it doesn’t look neat. Wounds and scars surface sideways—as anger, withdrawal, shame—when what’s really there is a scream or a cry for help.

It’s the scared little boy again.

The one afraid of getting punched or called a slur.

The one who learned that survival meant suppression.

And that strategy gets applied to everything: the death of friends, trauma from the military, missed holidays, lost loved ones, nieces growing up without you.

You bury it.

Until you don’t.

Until you learn emotional intelligence. Until you learn how to process, how to heal, how to express pain with empathy and compassion.

But then another question emerges: what happens when those emotions make other people uncomfortable?

What spaces exist for men to express fear, grief, and vulnerability without being mocked, without being pushed back into isolation, into the very silence that taught them to bury everything in the first place?

Isn’t that the crisis America is facing right now?

We ask men to show emotion — but we tightly control how and when it’s acceptable. And when years of repression collide with shame, what exactly did we expect to happen?

Do we need to feel sympathy for people who express hate? No.

But do we need to create space for men to share their insecurities, fears, hopes, and dreams — without subjecting them to the same ridicule that shaped them as children?

Yes. Absolutely.

We also need an infrastructure in place to care for them before it’s too late and mental illness turns into addiction, homelessness, or worse.

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An American Tragedy

On December 14, legendary filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead inside their home. Their son, Nick Reiner, was arrested later that night in connection with the homicides. He has since been charged and is being held at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles.

Nick Reiner reportedly first went to rehab at the age of 15. Born in 1993, he is the exact kind of young man I was speaking about earlier — someone who likely grew up in the same environment of repression and emotional secrecy many millennials recognize instinctively.

When signs of anxiety or mental illness are recognized in children, they can be taught early — how to process those feelings in healthy ways. For Millennials, therapy was only beginning to enter acceptable social conversations as we became adults. Among younger Gen Z, therapy is far more normalized, especially for young girls, and that shift is undeniably positive.

For millennials who acted out or turned to drugs, society offered a single answer: rehab.

Rehab facilities were everywhere, like Planet Fitness gyms. There were reality shows about celebrities going to rehab. Front-page news covered Britney Spears’ stay at Promises Malibu, framed as a 30-day reset. Addiction treatment became the default response to visible distress.

The Reiners saw their son suffering. Through drug use — likely intertwined with deeper emotional and mental health struggles — they did what parents are told to do: they sent him to rehab to get better.

Of course, that choice can strain any parent-child relationship. But they were acting on what society insisted was the solution. And it didn’t work. Nick reportedly cycled through rehab more than a dozen times, experienced periods of homelessness, and struggled to get clean while trying to make his parents proud.

At one point, he even collaborated with his father on a film loosely based on his experiences. It must have felt like a turning point—purpose, connection, hope. But trauma has a way of resurfacing.

For some young men, serious mental health disorders emerge in their late 20s — conditions like schizophrenia, dissociation, or severe mood disorders. These illnesses can be extraordinarily difficult to manage, especially without consistent treatment and proper medication. As discussed earlier, mental health is a delicate balance of time, therapy, medication management, and the sustained care of loved ones.

By all available accounts, Rob and Michele Reiner were still trying to protect their son. Reports indicate he was living in their guest house at the time of their deaths, and that they had brought him to a holiday gathering the night before to keep him close or keep an eye on him.

What else could they have done? Walk away? Give up on their child? There is no indication they could have foreseen the violence Nick Reiner now stands accused of.

Mental Health in Our Country

Nick Reiner is accused of an unspeakable act. If he committed what he has been charged with, it may have occurred during a severe mental health episode, substance-induced crisis, or some combination of both. That does not excuse the violence—but it does demand we understand the conditions that made it possible.

Years of repression.

Years of misunderstanding mental health and treatment.

A society that dismantled institutional care after Nixon and Reagan shuttered mental hospitals without replacing them with anything adequate.

Add untreated illness, addiction, and isolation to that void, and the result isn’t shocking, it’s predictable.

Nick Reiner is accused of killing his parents.

And countless other young — mostly white — men, shaped by similar conditions of suppression and neglect, have carried out mass shootings and acts of domestic terrorism.

Bullying that never stopped.

Emotions that were never given language.

A culture that glamorizes guns and violence while offering no meaningful space to process pain.

Where else did we expect them to turn?

A Look in the Mirror

If we don’t create space for healthy expression, we will keep confronting its worst manifestations.

People online claiming to see the “evil” in Nick Reiner’s eyes are missing the point. Do I think some people are capable of evil? Yes. But the person seen in interviews alongside his father during the filming of their movie didn’t appear evil—not in any meaningful sense of the world.

Mental illness has a way of distorting thought processes — especially in severe cases. Many people who experience acute episodes later return to moments of lucidity, shocked by their own behavior, stunned by the pain they’ve caused.

Nick Reiner is now sitting alone in prison, confronting the reality that he is accused of murdering his parents.

A son who was loved until the end committed an unspeakable act of violence—one that should have never happened.

In the wealthiest country in the world, there should be adequate healthcare — and mental healthcare — for young men struggling across the full spectrum of emotional pain, whether from bullying, trauma, or serious mental illness. If we fail to address this crisis, if we continue to deny young men the space to express themselves — not just in therapy, but with one another — we should not be surprised when these acts continue.

Evan Fields is a veteran who writes the News from Underground Substack and the Lincoln Square newsletters, Fourth & Democracy and The Weekly Wrap.