Drs. Cyril Wecht, Sanjay Gupta examine ‘deaths of despair’ in HBO documentary
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A new HBO documentary relies on Dr. Cyril Wecht, the renowned forensic pathologist, to provide medical support for the idea that stress is dramatically reducing the life expectancy of Americans.
“One Nation Under Stress,” which premiered on HBO on March 25, opens with a bird’s eye view of Western Pennsylvania and the Greensburg area along with a closeup of the Westmoreland County Forensic Center in Hempfield, where Wecht is seen performing autopsy No. 358 in late 2017.
“Last year, I did 556 autopsies. More than 300 were drug deaths. And this is what is being experienced, tragically, throughout the country,” Wecht tells Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN. “It is far greater than what we experienced with AIDS. It is a very significant epidemic of monstrous proportions.”
Gupta and an HBO film crew spent several days in Western Pennsylvania in 2017 shooting the documentary, which asserts that “deaths of despair” — from opioid overdoses, chronic liver disease (alcoholism) and suicide — are contributing to a dramatic drop in the life expectancy of Americans.
“In the 1960s, Americans had among the highest life expectancy in the world. Today, the U.S. ranks near the bottom of major developed nations,” according to the HBO website. “This rise in the U.S. mortality rate can be seen as a symptom of the toxic, pervasive stress in America today.”
In addition to Hempfield, where Wecht moved his autopsy practice in 2017, Gupta visited Wecht’s childhood neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District and the Butler County borough of Petrolia, where the 2017 closing of an Indspec Chemical Corp. plant left 220 people without jobs. Several overhead shots also show the Monongahela River and the Carrie Blast Furnaces in Rankin and Swissvale, Allegheny County.
Wecht told the Tribune-Review that Gupta, whom he has known for at least 10 years, has contacted him before and called on him to provide context in the documentary as an expert in drug-related deaths.
“There’s no question but that (despair) leads to increased drug abuse. It’s certainly a significant factor in those kinds of deaths,” said Wecht, the renowned forensic pathologist and former coroner and medical examiner of Allegheny County. “It’s not depression in the medical sense, but despair in a broader sense. It can be despair from the loss of a job.”
Wecht, of Squirrel Hill, said 2017 was “a huge year” for opioid overdose deaths in Westmoreland County. The day the HBO crew arrived at his Hempfield office, he performed five autopsies — including the suicide of a 19-year-old woman from Greene County and two drug overdoses.
“We certainly didn’t plan it that way,” he said.
Wecht provides autopsy services for medical examiners in Westmoreland, Fayette, Armstrong and Greene counties.
In the documentary, Wecht gives his own opinion on why there has been such a rise in opioid deaths.
“I think what we’re looking at is an increasingly stressed society. I think (it’s) a society in which the pressures become greater and greater, in all respects — making a living, depersonalization of society, the roboticization of society, families breaking up, splitting off. These are all things that I think play a role in leading to this stressful society that we have,” he said.
“And then you have changes on the medical side — the idea that people should not have to suffer, we’re going to take care of it. It’s very easy — you’re going to write the prescription.”
Gupta draws the conclusion that Americans are “self-medicating.”
The hourlong documentary concludes with another visit with Wecht, who states, “It does not appear that this epidemic is going to end in the foreseeable future. Who would disagree that we have a very stressful situation in our country?”