Spencer Reid

"I find that I do some of my best work under intense terror."

Dr. Spencer Reid is a Supervisory Special Agent with the BAU. He is hailed as a genius and an Autodidact.

Background
Spencer graduated from high school at age 12. In his youth, his father left him and his mother since his father could no longer deal with his mother's paranoid schizophrenia. He once mentioned that he was victim of bullying in school where he was stripped naked and tied to a goalpost in front of other students. After waiting for all the other teenagers to leave, he walked home, only to find that his mother had not noticed he was so late to return because she had been having one of her Schizophrenic episodes. Reid grew up learning nearly everything he knows from books, with his mother (a college professor) often reading to him. Still, Reid knew that the way his mother was living wasn't healthy.

When he was eighteen, he had his mother, Diana Reid, placed in a mental institution. His mother still resides in that same mental institution and Reid has stated that he sends letters every day because of the guilt he feels for not visiting her. Reid is also worried about the fact that his mother's illness can be passed on genetically; he once told Morgan that "I know what it's like to be afraid of your own mind."

Reid has an eidetic memory, meaning that he can remember an exceedingly large amount of information with extraordinary detail. This, however, only applies to information gathered visually (as implied with the word eidetic); he has not been so successful in auditory information, as evident when he once noted he could not remember "that new tech girl's name."

On the Job
Reid joined the FBI in 2004. His first case was that of The Blue Ridge Strangler (Tabula Rasa). Though he went to the FBI academy, he had trouble with just about everything that wasn't book-related, including marksmanship, physical training and obstacle course. In the end, they had to make special exceptions to get him into the field (What Happens at Home).

After being kidnapped by Tobias Hankel, and continuously injected with Dilaudid--which caused hallucinations of his past--Reid developed an addiction problem. This problem was discovered by Hotch and Gideon over time, as well as an old friend of Reid's in New Orleans. He has since become clean; in Elephant's Memory, he attended a support group meeting for addicts in law enforcement. He said he'd been experiencing cravings recently and spoke of the teenage suspect shot in front of him before being interrupted by a page from work. He was surprised to find one of his superiors attending the same meeting. The older agent, named "John", loaned Reid his one year sobriety coin, making Reid promise that he would return once he earned his own. He is still very particular about staying clean, as seen in Amplification when he strictly refused to take any kind of painkillers after being infected by anthrax.

In the season 3 episode Damaged he managed to save himself and Hotch by delaying Chester Hardwick (who intended to kill them as a way to evade the execution of his death sentence) giving him his profile. When the situation had been diffused, he stated that he didn't know if the profile was accurate, thus revealing it had been improvised on the spot using his encyclopedic knowledge. He also stated that he does some of his best work when under 'intense terror'.

In the season 4 episode Minimal Loss, he and Prentiss are held hostage by a cult led by a polygamist resulting in him feeling guilty over his fellow agent getting beaten by the cult leader. In The Instincts a young boy disappears and it leads Reid to some questions about his own past.

In "52 Pickup", Reid won a date with a bartender while investigating a serial killer. On Morgan's advice (who told him "chicks dig magic tricks"), he performed an impressive illusion with a pen and a flier showing a police sketch of the Unsub. The bartender would later call him and ask him out, though nothing appears to have come of it.

In Nameless, Faceless (the Season Five premiere), Reid is shot in the leg by an unsub while protecting a doctor whom the killer had targeted. It is a non-life-threatening wound, and Reid tells the doctor to treat the unsub instead of him. In the next episode, Haunted, he carried crutches. Later in the season he moved on to use a cane and continued doing so until the episode The Uncanny Valley.

In "100", Reid manages to figure out that George Foyet is using the alias "Peter Rhea", which is an anagram of "The Reaper". The team finds out Rhea's address and storms his apartment, only to find that Foyet had posted an internet alert on the name Peter Rhea (to alert him if the name was ever investigated), and has disappeared.

In Corazón, Reid began suffering powerful headaches as well as hallucinatory episodes while working the case. In the end of the episode, he goes to see a doctor, who finds nothing physically wrong with him, suggesting it may be a psychosomatic disorder. Terrified of having inherited his mother's schizophrenia, he vehemently denies this and storms out of the office. He appears to be well in the following episodes, though in Coda, he is seen carrying a book about migraines. In Valhalla, he tells Prentiss about his headaches. In With Friends Like These..., Reid tells about his problems to Morgan, remarking that he only read five books the previous week.