The Wellness Files with Kari Beal
Sep 24, 2026 · 24 min · 10 segments
Following a coroner's report identifying five substances in Hayden Panettiere’s body, host Kari Beal sits down with addiction researcher and psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Friedman to break down the deadly…
Joseph FriedmanGuest
Keri BealHost
So what advice do you have for loved ones who are trying to help their family member who might be struggling through a mental health crisis to make sure this doesn't happen to another person?
Although addiction is really challenging, the good news is we do have evidence-based treatments.
So there are medications that can be really effective in stabilizing people who've become kind of dependent on like illicit fentanyl, for example.
And I think it's important to know that you're not alone, right? There's a whole host of new tools that in modern medicine we've developed to kind of help people get stabilized and And so not having to go kind of through the worst of withdrawals if they want to stop using like an illicit opioid.
And that can be really, really helpful and a big source of comfort for a lot of folks.
Others say we need to attack the root cause of the pain or the mental instability.
Yeah, well, you know, I think we need to do both of those things, right? Like we need to ensure that people who are already in a difficult situation are able to get the help they need, right? So we know that, you know, relative to other countries, unfortunately, given the scale of our addiction problem, we still need more treatment.
We need far higher rates of access to addiction treatments that are evidence-based.
At the same time, among the wider community of people who don't currently have an addiction problem, we also want to do everything we can to prevent them from developing one.
You know, unfortunately, what we've seen over the years is that it's really hard to decrease access to illicit drugs in the community.
It's like this whack-a-mole problem where, you know, as we have kind of point down on one thing, usually something else kind of pops up to fill the void because it's just such a profitable industry.
you know, there's been some really great investigative reports like journalists who've kind of shown that for a few thousand dollars on the dark web, you can buy everything required to make millions of dollars of fentanyl because it's just really easy to make.
You can make it, you know, it's the actual chemistry of it is very straightforward and there's this huge profit margin and there's a huge demand for it.
So it's pretty difficult to to kind of fully, you know, crack down on it and completely get this kind of off of the street.
I think we all, you know, of course, we wish we could just snap our fingers and just solve the problem that way.
And so, although I think we want to do everything we can to kind of get the highest risk stuff out of our communities, at the same time, what we need to help, you know, a huge swath of people that already have an addiction problem.
So what advice do you have for loved ones who are trying to help their family member who might be struggling through a mental health crisis to make sure this doesn't happen to another person?
Although addiction is really challenging, the good news is we do have evidence-based treatments.
So there are medications that can be really effective in stabilizing people who've become kind of dependent on like illicit fentanyl, for example.
And I think it's important to know that you're not alone, right? There's a whole host of new tools that in modern medicine we've developed to kind of help people get stabilized and And so not having to go kind of through the worst of withdrawals if they want to stop using like an illicit opioid.
And that can be really, really helpful and a big source of comfort for a lot of folks.
Others say we need to attack the root cause of the pain or the mental instability.
Yeah, well, you know, I think we need to do both of those things, right? Like we need to ensure that people who are already in a difficult situation are able to get the help they need, right? So we know that, you know, relative to other countries, unfortunately, given the scale of our addiction problem, we still need more treatment.
We need far higher rates of access to addiction treatments that are evidence-based.
At the same time, among the wider community of people who don't currently have an addiction problem, we also want to do everything we can to prevent them from developing one.
You know, unfortunately, what we've seen over the years is that it's really hard to decrease access to illicit drugs in the community.
It's like this whack-a-mole problem where, you know, as we have kind of point down on one thing, usually something else kind of pops up to fill the void because it's just such a profitable industry.
you know, there's been some really great investigative reports like journalists who've kind of shown that for a few thousand dollars on the dark web, you can buy everything required to make millions of dollars of fentanyl because it's just really easy to make.
You can make it, you know, it's the actual chemistry of it is very straightforward and there's this huge profit margin and there's a huge demand for it.
So it's pretty difficult to to kind of fully, you know, crack down on it and completely get this kind of off of the street.
I think we all, you know, of course, we wish we could just snap our fingers and just solve the problem that way.
And so, although I think we want to do everything we can to kind of get the highest risk stuff out of our communities, at the same time, what we need to help, you know, a huge swath of people that already have an addiction problem.
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