The Wrong Treatment: How Nick Reiner's Schizophrenia Was Missed for Years | Shavaun Scott
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2026
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nick Reiner started using drugs at fifteen. By sixteen, he was in his first rehab. By twenty-two, he'd been through eighteen treatment programs. The focus was always addiction. Heroin. Meth. Cocaine. The revolving door of substance abuse treatment.
But according to reports, Nick had schizophrenia. A serious psychotic disorder that was reportedly diagnosed years before the killings — but after years of being treated for the wrong thing.
Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins us to examine what may have been a catastrophic misdiagnosis. She explains what schizophrenia actually is and how it differs from addiction. She describes how serious mental illness can hide behind substance abuse — and how the addiction often is the self-medication, the person's attempt to manage symptoms they don't understand.
What happens when you put someone with an undiagnosed psychotic disorder through addiction treatment? What are those programs doing to them — or failing to do for them? And why does the treatment industry keep cycling patients through without catching what's actually wrong?
We also examine the medication change that reportedly occurred three to four weeks before the killings. Shavaun explains what happens during psychiatric medication transitions, why they're dangerous, and what destabilization looks like in someone with schizophrenia. Sources say Nick was "out of his head" after the switch. This is the clinical explanation of what that means.
#NickReiner #Schizophrenia #MentalHealth #ShavaunScott #HiddenKillers #DualDiagnosis #Addiction #RobReiner #Treatment #TrueCrime
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske. |
| 0:03.2 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:06.1 | For 17 years, Nick Reiner was treated as an addict. |
| 0:09.7 | He went to 18 rehab programs. |
| 0:12.0 | He did wilderness therapy. |
| 0:13.7 | He did high-end residential facilities. |
| 0:15.9 | He did 12-step programs. |
| 0:17.8 | The entire intervention strategy was organized around substance abuse. But addiction |
| 0:23.5 | wasn't the whole story. According to TMZ and NBC4, Nick had been diagnosed with schizophrenia |
| 0:29.1 | reportedly years before the killings. He was under the care of a psychiatrist. He was in a |
| 0:34.1 | facility on and off that specialized in treating patients with both mental illness and addiction. |
| 0:39.6 | And three to four weeks before his parents were found dead, his doctors changed his medications. |
| 0:44.4 | Sources say that after the change, Nick was out of his head. |
| 0:48.1 | That his erratic behavior became erratic and dangerous. |
| 0:51.8 | And the doctors were trying to stabilize him, but it was not working. |
| 0:55.2 | This raises a question that oughts the entire case. |
| 0:58.6 | What if the fundamental approach was wrong from the beginning? |
| 1:01.3 | What if years of addiction treatment missed the underlying psychotic disorder? |
| 1:06.3 | What if Nick was self-medicating, a broken brain with heroin and meth, |
| 1:11.0 | and everyone kept treating the drugs instead of the disease underneath? |
| 1:15.5 | Psychotherapist, Chivon Scott, is with us to examine what schizophrenia actually is, |
| 1:20.2 | how it interacts with substance abuse, and why years of expensive treatment may have been treating the wrong problem. |
... |
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