Stream It Or Skip It: ‘One Nation Under Stress’ On HBO, Where Dr. Sanjay Gupta Explores How Stress Is Killing Us In Sneaky Ways

Do you know how stressed we are here in the U.S.? It’s gotten so bad that our average life expectancy has gone down for the first time in decades. CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, wanted to know why that is; his path to discovering how pervasive stress is in our lives is the basis of the new HBO documentary One Nation Under Stress. Read on for more…

ONE NATION UNDER STRESS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, spent two years trying to get answers as to why the life expectancy of Americans has shrunk for the first time in decades. The biggest reason is stress. But what is stress, and why does it seem like we’re perpetually stressed out? That’s the gist of this documentary.

Gupta tries to get to the bottom of why three categories of deaths — suicide, drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, each so-called “deaths of despair” — have increased in this country over the past 20 years, and seem to be especially prevalent now even when it feels like our economy is going well.

But is it? Gupta eventually drills down to the idea of economic and social certainty, and talks to people who have lost their jobs via plant closings and have few prospects of getting that income back; he also talks to a Texas mom who has had so many stressors in her life, including losing one of her children during childbirth, that she’s on multiple medications and can’t imagine getting off them. The uncertainty puts us in a constant fight or flight mode, which is horrible for our overall health, much less the fact that it affects how we reason and think.

Gupta also dives a little into his background in Michigan, where his parents both worked for Ford as engineers, and got let go from their jobs in the mid-’00s without much explanation, despite being with the company over 30 years each. He also speaks to experts in neuroscience, including one who has studied how animals deal with stress in order to figure out why we as humans are so stressed out all the time.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pretty much any documentary that discusses how we’re killing ourselves as a society, like Fast Food Nation, Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, Super Size Me, etc. Only this one has a whole lot of Sanjay Gupta.

Performance Worth Watching: Dr. Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist (and attorney!) who is based in the Pittsburgh area. He’s been one of the country’s foremost experts in the field, and he tells Gupta in no uncertain terms that he’s seeing many more overdoses and suicides than he used to.

Memorable Dialogue: “The other night I was thinking I should take all of these [pills], and just go to sleep” — Angela Glass, the aforementioned mom in Texas, who has a perpetual look of worry on her face as she talks to Gupta about her stress levels. With the help of her husband and mother, she eventually checks into rehab, and tearfully says to her husband, “I’m sorry.”

Single Best Shot: As Gupta walks through the offices of CNN, his voice over says, “I don’t know what’s to be done about this epidemic of self-destructive behavior.” It’s at that moment that he walks past a portrait of the late Anthony Bourdain, with sticky notes of appreciation surrounding his picture. It’s the most chilling moment in the film — and this is a film that starts in a morgue, where we see a shit ton of dead bodies.

Our Take: While One Nation Under Stress is produced and directed by veteran filmmaker Marc Levin, this is a Sanjay Gupta show all the way. Why do we think that? Because we see so much of him.

We see Gupta walking through the airport, we see him talking to his neurosurgery residents at his “other job” at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, we see him talking to his interview subjects, we see him viewing videos and going over copy in his CNN office, we see him talking in his car on the way from work, tie loosened ever-so-delicately. Finally, we get an all-too-scattered look at how his childhood relates to stress, to the point where we’re not sure how he’ll link in being in the only Indian family in Livonia, MI, to the stress his friends and parents felt when they were laid off from their jobs.

The topic of this documentary is critical, but it feels like Levin and Gupta should have treated it less like a CNN expose and all the stylistic tics those kinds of shows have (like lots of shots of the reporter talking to his/her interviewees) and more facts, figures, and real-life examples. We understand why having Gupta’s presence can connect the subject matter to people who watch him all the time on CNN, but at times we saw so much of him that we wanted to retitle this documentary How Sanjay Gupta Gets Stressed About Stress. Considering its running time of just over an hour, it could have taken out half the shots of Gupta we got and given more infographics and other visual aids to illustrate the problem. Because they wanted to emphasize that this was Gupta’s journey of discovery, however, they missed a chance to really land the message with their audience.

Our Call: SKIP IT, unless you’re a Sanjay Gupta superfan. The information imparted in One Nation Under Stress can be obtained elsewhere.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch One Nation Under Stress on HBO Go