The troubles in Milford Hills: was it something in the water? Even odder than the small town’s alarming cancer rate was the fact that so many people were committing suicide. Coincidence? Or could the nearby industrial plants be poisoning minds as well as bodies? Rick Weisler decided to look into his own mother’s death — and came up with some deeply unsettling findings. David France reports.

The attractive ranch house, with its majestic shade trees and sweeping horseshoe driveway, looks much as it had when Rick Weisler grew up here in the 1960s. And it is largely unchanged from the day in 1999 when his mother called him back home to break some tragic news. Although she felt marvelous, a doctor had discovered that her body was riddled with cancer — it had started in the left lung and moved to the bones and brain. Her chances of survival were slim.

It was an awful homecoming. But what he remembers from that day was the neighborhood’s smell. “I’d been away for a while — I was really struck by how bad the air quality was,” he tells me one recent afternoon as we drive past the house in the Milford Hills neighborhood of Salisbury, North Carolina. “Sometimes I would wheeze.”

The stench, which he had taken for granted as a child, came from two separate asphalt facilities located just across a five-lane avenue, about 700 and 1,250 feet to the southwest. One, a former Chevron plant now owned by a company called Associated Asphalt, is a transfer station for tarlike bitumen, the raw ingredient for road surfaces; 240 million pounds of the stuff arrive in railroad tankers every year. After being heated to approximately 300 degrees, the liquid is siphoned into large storage vats, a procedure that can send malodorous plumes well past the Weislers’ neighborhood and has drawn complaints from a mile or more away.

Directly behind that is a second installation. Once the site of a North Carolina Department of Transportation (DOT) asphalt testing facility, it is where the molten bitumen is mixed into paving materials for road crews. In the spring and summer—“paving season,” according to a state DOT official — the fumes emanating from there are unmistakable.

“On a good day, you get this pungent odor, and neighbors begin complaining,” says Richard Kelly, risk manager for the city of Salisbury, who is responsible for investigating reports of poor air quality. Since 1999, Kelly says, more than 600 complaints have come in from two neighborhoods adjoining the facilities, Milford Hills and Meadowbrook—well-off, racially mixed suburbs where homes seldom go on the market and successive generations commonly return to raise their own children.

Weisler’s widowed mother, Rita, was 72 years old and still running a very successful wholesale beer business when she was diagnosed. Though she smoked in her youth, she hadn’t touched a cigarette in at least 35 years, according to her family. In fact, her friends say she was a total health nut who could be seen taking vigorous walks around Milford Hills. But her prognosis was not good. She told her children she believed those smells had something to do with her ailment. Not only that, she believed they had harmed many of her neighbors as well. “I went for a walk with my mother, and she pointed out who was sick,” her son tells me. “There were three people within a 150-yard radius all with lung cancer at that time. Two more of her neighbors had died from colon cancer and one from leukemia. A few blocks farther down one of the streets, I later learned, there was a 3-year-old and a 51-year-old with brain cancer, both diagnosed within a month of each other.

“We kind of pooh-poohed the idea initially,” continues Weisler, a soft-spoken, wild-haired MD who is adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and adjunct assistant professor at Duke University Medical Center, when not seeing patients privately. His sister, Ann Edmundson, who is also an MD (her specialty is endocrinology), hadn’t encouraged her mother’s suspicions, either. “We didn’t take it as seriously as I wish we had, in retrospect,” she says. “I think she was probably frustrated about that.”

But as more neighborhood stories surfaced—and as their mother grew weaker — the two began to wonder about her hunch. “The incident rate of disease didn’t seem to be normal,” Weisler says. In the years since then, he has devoted his spare time to studying the residents of his old neighborhood, a two-hour drive from his home in Raleigh, where he and his wife raised their three sons, now 19, 20, and 25. What he has found may be among the most startling evidence of the impact of industrial pollution on a residential community.

Even more surprising than the high rate of certain diseases in Milford Hills is a discovery Weisler made quite unexpectedly. “Just talking to people, I learned that there were way too many people depressed,” he says. His own mother, who moved her family to the neighborhood in 1961, had been treated for depression since the 1970s.

Weisler thinks this, too, may be related to the asphalt plants, which produce hydrogen sulfide, a foul-smelling, powerful neurotoxin. Nobody has ever proved the gas’s involvement in depressing a whole community, and Weisler’s research is far from conclusive. But his theory intrigues experts in environmental and chemical toxicity. “This would be a really big deal, if he can prove it,” says David Michaels, PhD, an epidemiologist and professor of environmental health at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services. “There is no question that environmental toxins affect the heart and blood and liver—why shouldn’t they also affect the brain?”

It is a loaded hypothesis. Approximately one out of ten American adults suffers from depression every year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and between 1988 and 2000, the use of mood-lifting medication almost tripled. Depression has actually been on the rise with each generation since World War II, although it’s begun to level off in the past decade, and experts debate whether the numbers reflect better reporting and more people seeking help—or changes in the disease rate itself. What’s clear, however, is that the comfortable suburban life people thought they were leading in the Weislers’ old neighborhood may have put them in terrible peril.

Unfortunately, Weisler was never able to tell his mother that her suspicions seemed founded. Despite radiation, she died in 2001, at age 74. “I definitely think Rick is onto something,” says his sister, Ann. “You have to wonder if this isn’t happening in other areas, but nobody like Rick is there with the time and ability to do the research.”

Federal and state health officials receive thousands of “cluster alarms” each year, from citizens or their doctors worried about local elevated incidences of anything from asthma to cancer. But according to the National Center for Environmental Health, most of the alarms don’t pan out. In 85 to 90 percent of alleged cancer clusters, for instance, the perceived increase in diagnoses actually isn’t abnormal, and of the rest, only a handful lead to making a connection between a toxin or preventable cause and disease. It doesn’t require an abnormally paranoid mind to think you see illness patterns among neighbors or coworkers when none exist. In fact, drawing such connections is part of human nature, says medical epidemiologist Raymond Richard Neutra, MD, chief of the division of environmental and occupational disease control in the California Department of Health Services and an expert in disease-cluster investigation. “When you see a vivid pattern, you pay attention to it,” he says. More often than not, though, such apparent outbreaks are mere coincidence or an epidemic of bad luck. “There are unfortunate lotteries running on each [disease], and some will be unusually high and some will be unusually low” at any given time.

When significant increases do appear, pinning down a cause can be dicey work. A prime example is AIDS. Doctors didn’t know what to make of it when a relatively rare skin cancer started showing up among gay men in 1981. So they called in agents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to carefully evaluate and monitor the new cases to see what they had in common. It took two years for scientists to finger HIV, an emerging virus, and suggest ways to halt transmission. Epidemiologists did similar work when the sudden appearance of SARS in 2002 lead to the discovery of a new airborne antigen.

But more often the results are frustratingly inconclusive. After spending tens of millions of dollars investigating elevated rates of breast cancer among women living in seven zip codes on Long Island, New York, health officials are still puzzled. Perhaps, they conclude, the communities’ genetic predispositions are similar, or they share unique fertility histories. These answers don’t tend to satisfy the affected population, many of whom may jump to their own conclusions, like Rick Weisler’s mother. Of course, they are not always right. In Memphis many years back, residents of one area grew convinced that their disparate health concerns were all directly related to an alleged toxic waste dump—only to learn that no such dump had ever existed.

Cancer clusters present the hardest challenges for epidemiologists. Cancer still remains one of the biggest mysteries of modern science. Since 1990 there have been more than 17 million new cases diagnosed in America. Health experts believe the majority of them are linked to lifestyle factors such as smoking, poor diet, excess weight, lack of exercise, and overexposure to the sun. Less is known about environmental causes.

Elevated disease rates have been noticed among people employed at asphalt plants or on road crews. Many experts, however, downplay the likelihood of a casual community-wide contamination in residential settings, except in a case like that of Chernobyl, where since the 1986 nuclear disaster, scores of children have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, probably stemming from radiation exposure. Secondhand smoke, lead, asbestos, and chemicals like benzene are considered extremely dangerous to people exposed to them day in and day out. Meanwhile, common industrial toxins released into the air or water are increasingly suspected of causing illness, although with little hard proof. “In certain blue-collar occupational settings, you can expect to find clusters from time to time. But in residential settings and schools, those clusters are overwhelmingly due to the unlucky lottery,” says Neutra, referring again to the randomness of nature that often swings statistics.

Weisler was not trained in epidemiology, but he was driven by grief over his mother’s illness to test her anecdotal observation. Was she right about the numbers of diagnoses? To find out, he went to North Carolina’s central cancer registry. Established by law in every state, cancer registries are databases in which doctors, hospitals, and laboratories are required to record every new malignancy diagnosis, along with demographic data on the patient, such as age, vocation, and home address. Their purpose is to help public health authorities identify risk factors, including environmental exposure, and devise prevention campaigns. Some important facts have come from the registries, including the finding that Hispanic women are at greater risk for cervical cancer. As a result, health officials now run Spanish-language campaigns to encourage routine screening, says Nancy Weiss, PhD, the manager of the Texas Cancer Registry. “Cervical cancer is very treatable, so this helps us save lives.”

Teasing out the Milford Hills and Meadowbrook data from the North Carolina registry was a time-consuming undertaking for Weisler, as was painstakingly gathering his own statistics on residents with cancer. But when it was all completed, he was stunned to see that his mother had been right. Over the previous decade in the two neighborhoods, where just 1,561 people live, according to the most recent census figures, there were dozens of cancers—lung, ovary, and blood, among others. Surely this was more than might be expected, he thought.

What struck Weisler as most perplexing was the number of primary brain cancers. Cancers that begin in the brain, rather than spread there from other organs, are extraordinarily rare and deadly. Just seven Americans per 100,000 receive such a dire diagnosis. Yet in these small neighborhoods, he was able to confirm at least seven cases of primary brain cancer between 1988 and 2000—a staggering 5.6 times greater than the statewide rate. Going out a little farther into adjacent areas, Weisler found that in one year alone, three brain cancers were diagnosed among children ages 3, 11, and 16. “That’s 300 times the rate you would expect in a 12-month period,” he says. “It’s really, really odd.”

One of those children was Wendy Baskins’s son, Stephen Gilmore, a sports-obsessed 3-year-old when his health began to decline in February 2000. “He started vomiting,” says Baskins, 38, a social work supervisor, “and walking like a drunk — his gait was real unsteady.” She thought he might have a milk allergy, or maybe an ear infection. It took her weeks to get an appointment with his regular pediatrician but only a few minutes for the doctor to suspect medulloblastoma, a rare disease with a ten-year survival rate of only about 47 percent. Luckily, after enduring a series of surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy, Stephen has reached the five-year marker after diagnosis. The treatment nonetheless has taken a toll. Doctors say he is likely to have lost ten or 20 IQ points as a result, according to Baskins.

While at the hospital for her son’s radiation and chemotherapy, Baskins learned of another medulloblastoma in the neighborhood, her first sign that something might be amiss. She spoke to researchers, including Weisler, whose insights about increased brain cancers convinced her that toxins in the local air or water may be to blame. She has since moved.

“Maybe there were some things being done that were not environmentally safe. It raises the possibility that [they] could have been a factor in my son’s tumor,” she says. “I choose not to dwell on it. I dwell on how I’m going to get him through school.”

Cathy Cheves Gusa, a longtime Meadowbrook resident, has similar suspicions. When her husband, Roy, was diagnosed with primary brain cancer in 1995, she didn’t have any reason to suspect an environmental cause. But that changed when their good friend and neighbor Sandy Kelly was handed the exact same diagnosis about a year later. “This was across the street from the house I grew up in,” Gusa says. “I feel quite different about it now.”

Roy died of his disease in 1997, at age 47, and Sandy Kelly was 51 when she succumbed in 1999. “It was quite debilitating, to say the least,” says her husband, Richard — the same Richard Kelly who investigates air quality complaints for the local government. Only since Rick Weisler began putting together all the data did Kelly come to think there could be a possible connection. Now he worries that Milford Hills might be some sort of toxic nightmare. “I personally respond to 100 percent of the complaints. And when I do, I enter the plant premises and my job is to smell and rate the level of the odor. So I’m kinda getting a double shot of the stuff. I would dread finding out that there are medical problems associated with inhaling the fumes.”

In his Raleigh offices recently, Weisler, 54, balances a large map of his old neighborhood on an easel. In the lower left corner is a constellation of industrial facilities: the two asphalt plants, but also an old Exxon “petroleum tank farm,” a Southern States fertilizer depot, and a concern called Concrete Supply Company — all walking distance apart. Directly across the street are the tidy homes and tall trees of his youth—complete with a golf course, a VA hospital, and a meandering creek that laces the backyards together.

He pulls forward a transparent Mylar sheet on top of the map, which starts to tell a narrative about what has gone on in Milford Hills and Meadowbrook. On the overlay are blue dots marking the home addresses of everybody who died of lung cancer. They spread northeast, the same direction as the prevailing wind. “Can you see the plume pattern?” he asks. “And look at this. The farther you get from these buildings, the less concentrated the cases are.” It’s true—a tight spray of dots dissipates as the distance increases.

Over this diagram he unfolds another transparency with green dots showing blood cancer diagnoses, such as leukemia, and a yellow-dotted page marking cancers of the pancreas. Then a sheet showing childhood brain cancers, and another showing adult cases, like Kelly’s and Gusa’s. “You see? It follows the same path,” he says ominously. So do fatal cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia.

Showing what might strike some as an obsessive drive, Weisler began working day and night after plotting the disease incidences. He sent his research intern, Stacey Tsougas, an environmental science and policy major at Duke, to spend a few days in Salisbury gathering information. But first she stopped at the local office of records to read through catalogs of death certificates.

“I had a laptop with me, and I put [the data] into my spreadsheet — name and age, where they lived, what they died from, that kind of thing,” recalls Tsougas, who is now 23. She logged each of the heart attacks, lung diseases, and various cancers. But soon something else started surfacing. For an unexpected number of people from Milford Hills and Meadowbrook, suicide was listed as the cause of death. All were men in their middle or later years—a lawyer, an accountant, business owners, two retirees. “One had hung himself, one shot himself in the head, one person shot himself in the chest. It was really strange,” she says.

Back at the office, she and Weisler eventually documented six suicides between 1994 and 2003 — a rate three times higher than expected. “I wasn’t totally surprised,” Weisler explains. “I knew plenty of people were depressed.”

Suicides that take place in clusters are quite rare. When they do occur, they almost always involve chain reactions among teenagers or adults under 25, says Madelyn Gould, PhD, a professor of epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia University who has studied suicide clusters. The triggers can be varied — a suicide in the community, for instance, or a national news story romanticizing a tragic death. After Marilyn Monroe was found dead from a drug overdose in 1962 at age 36, health officials tracked a 12 percent rise in suicides. The phenomenon is called imitative suicide. Gould adds that men are at least five times as likely to commit suicide as women, though women may make more attempts. “But it’s highly unusual to find an adult-male cluster. You don’t see these outbreaks.”

Even as Tsougas and Weisler were analyzing the data, there was another attempted suicide in the small area. “When we learned that, we really started to worry,” says Tsougas.

Fearing the community remained at an elevated risk for suicide, the two began working on a prevention campaign. Late last year they sent out a press release under the ominous headline increased suicide rate is possibly linked to chemicals released from nearby asphalt plants. Immediately, their voice mail began filling with reports of people attempting to take their lives, stories that had never made the papers. “There are four that I know of myself,” says a public health nurse from Milford Hills who reached out to Weisler. “I thought that was quite a few for me to know about.”

State and local health authorities, meanwhile, have not been immediately impressed. “I don’t think there’s enough to convince me one way or another,” says Leonard Wood, the county’s public health director. He’s concerned that Weisler is excluding data that might contradict his findings by limiting his inquiry to the two neighborhoods north and east of the plants rather than drawing a five- or ten-mile radius around the suspected toxins. Otherwise the population is too small, Wood argues, to draw any conclusions. “If you take the surrounding areas and look at the total, your study population goes up significantly but your significance statistically decreases,” he says. “Dr. Weisler is drawing fairly significant conclusions, in my opinion, based on a statistical analysis that may or may not be true.”

Chuck Pippin, a hydrogeologist with North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources, is even more troubled. He questions almost every aspect of Weisler’s scholarship, and is especially defensive about suggestions that the state has been slow to rectify toxic spills and control emissions in the neighborhoods. “Is it unhealthy to live there? I don’t know,” Pippin says. “I haven’t seen any real data to confirm it or deny it.”

But officers at the CDC think Weisler and his supporters may be on the right track. They acknowledge that preliminary data do point to increased rates of brain cancer in this area, and, while they can’t comment on whether there’s an elevated suicide rate, they encourage him to continue his research. “He’s noticed this important problem there and has taken action,” says Pam Tucker, MD, a doctor of environmental medicine at the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. “Now, what the cause is, we don’t know at this point—whether it’s a social cause or a biological cause or not anything we can really say.”

In 2000, before putting the asphalt facilities at the top of his list of suspects, Weisler paid a visit to his mother’s best friend, an attractive woman named Billie Alexander, who lived directly across the street. She confided in him that she was taking Effexor for unceasing depression. As she listened to him detail his investigation into a possible cause, she remembered something that might be useful. “I told him the city switched my well over to city water in 1993, but I had no idea why,” says Alexander. Weisler’s mother had switched years before that, but on her own initiative—and at a significant financial cost, like almost everybody else in the neighborhood. Alexander’s was done for free. He wanted an explanation.

Together they telephoned the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and a clerk read to them from a document stating that Alexander’s well was found to be contaminated with the chlorinated solvent tetrachloroethene, Weisler recalls.

The revelation sickened him and enraged Alexander. “It never was quite spelled out to us,” she says. “My husband said, ‘How about I could use the well to water my lawn?’ They said no, absolutely not, we could not do that. But they did not tell us why.”

Weisler soon discovered that the Department of Transportation had undertaken a comprehensive site assessment of the area around the DOT asphalt testing facility in 1996 and 1997, collecting data and quantifying the extent of soil and groundwater contamination. The study, which wasn’t publicized at the time, found that it had been standard practice to use chlorinated solvents in testing asphalt samples for purity — and those solvents ended up in the ground. Dumped was the word a local newspaper, The News and Observer, later used: “Toxic chemicals had been dumped at the plant.” Not only were shallow groundwater reservoirs polluted but the study also reported that the deeper reservoirs were contaminated with solvents above the allowable standards. It was in the appendices that Weisler found earlier assessments of about ten homes in the neighborhood, and three including Alexander’s were shown to have contaminated wells. One family was warned not to even bathe or take showers in their water.

Several chemical pollutants highlighted in the DOT report—some of which were also found in the neighbors’ wells — have been associated with increased risk of various cancers, according to studies. By the time Chuck Pippin, at North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources, went back and surveyed 30 or so homes a few years ago, most residents had switched to city water.

Meanwhile the state has not accepted responsibility for the contamination. Pippin says there is no evidence that any DOT toxins migrated into the community. For example, the compound in the Alexander well wasn’t used in the DOT asphalt testing lab, although it was found nearby. Still he doubts that was the source of the Alexanders’ contamination, because local topography suggests the water would flow in a different direction. “We think it’s a self-contamination,” he says. “You may have taken clothes from the dry cleaner and washed them at home. Or you like to do work on your car — there used to be a lot of household chemicals with these types of chlorinated solvents in the home. We just don’t know.” He says the DOT paid for the Alexanders’ hookup to city water “in the spirit of neighborliness.”

“It makes me mad, it truly does,” says Alexander, who lost her husband, a commercial contractor, three years ago to pancreatic cancer. “These people knew about this way back! Years ago, they knew. I think the state is involved. I truly do. And I know our well was contaminated. They knew! They tried to say perhaps my husband had used some solvents to clean some machinery or something. But all the time they knew. They knew what they had done.”

Alexander has since hired an attorney to file suit, alleging wrongful death of her husband. Rick Weisler and his sister have done the same in the case of their mother. Driving around the neighborhood recently, he regarded the industrial complexes there warily. They were an intimate part of the landscape of his childhood. Just next to them, the field where he played as a boy is now a parking lot. “I’m fully confident that growing up, I drank contaminated water. I know I did when I went to Billie Alexander’s to play all the time,” he says angrily. “It is frightening to have a system where even once they discovered it, they found no obligation to tell people—just unbelievable.”

What diverted Weisler’s focus from the water back to airborne toxins like hydrogen sulfide were the suicides — and the fact that while the solvents found in the wells might explain increased cancer, they seemed unlikely agents for mental illness. It was the smell of the asphalt plants, after all, that first drew his suspicion. In addition, he found in his mother’s effects copies of letters she had written complaining of increases in air pollutants in the late 1990s. Some of the local data seemed to bolster this argument. In 2003, for example, Rowan County, where Milford Hills is situated, was named the 16th-worst county in the nation for smog by the American Lung Association. That same year, the suicide rate in the Milford Hills–Meadowbrook area peaked at more than ten times the statewide average, according to Weisler.

A search of the medical literature turned up a 1988 study of California highway crews showing excess deaths from many causes, including statistically significant increases in certain cancers (like brain cancer) and suicides. A similar study published the following year that examined 1,320 asphalt workers in Denmark found marked rises in brain cancer. Just how occupational asphalt exposure might lead to such health concerns is unclear, but it’s known that hydrogen sulfide, the main odor-causing gas by-product (it smells like rotten eggs), can be lethal if you inhale it. And according to Environmental and Chemical Toxins and Psychiatric Illness, exposure to this chemical can cause depression, anxiety, irritability, violence, and other personality changes—although the author, James S. Brown Jr., MD, acknowledges a lack of formal studies on the subject.

The CDC’s Tucker calls Weisler’s hypothesis “interesting” but cautions that “scientists still don’t know if the diluted quantities area residents experienced, even over many years, would have lasting consequences.” Neil Carman, PhD, the Clean Air Program director for the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, says that if Weisler’s theory were true, suicides would be at epidemic levels, which they are not. “Hydrogen sulfide gas is one of the most common toxic pollutants in the United States. It’s everywhere!” Yet suicide rates have remained relatively stable since 1950.

One of the leading experts on low-level hydrogen sulfide exposure, however, believes there could be a connection. Kaye Kilburn, MD, a professor of internal and environmental medicine at the University of Southern California, considers the gas — produced by many industries, including sewage treatment, but also a factory-farm by-product—one of the most ignored health risks of our time. He says he has treated more than 500 people with severe neurological consequences of hydrogen sulfide exposure. “Sitting here right now, I don’t recall a suicide,” says Kilburn, “but if I got a call in an hour that one of them had committed suicide, it would not surprise me. . . I have a patient who was a concert-level pianist, and she can’t play because she’s lost the capacity to remember music and to move her fingers with enough accomplishment to be a pianist.”

He says more needs to be learned about the neuropsychological effects of hydrogen sulfide. Meanwhile there is no national standard limiting its release, and sources are multiplying at alarming rates. Water purification plants account for an increasing share, as do natural gas exploration fields like those popping up in backyards across Texas and other western states. “We’re badly polluting our world, and our brain is the principal target of this,” Kilburn says. “Who is the Frenchman who wrote, ‘Every society has the criminals it deserves’? I would just change it to say, ‘Every society has the diseases it deserves.’”

This past year, Weisler, with the help of two more interns — Melissa Fiffer, 21, and Lisa Turner, 22 — devised a test for his hydrogen sulfide–suicide hypothesis. They identified another location in North Carolina that is chronically exposed to the chemical as well as others. Haywood County is a lightly populated area that sits in a valley among the western Blue Ridge Mountains. Its biggest company is a large paper mill. According to local environmental groups, the smell of rotten eggs is almost constant. “We assumed because hydrogen sulfide is heavier than air, and Haywood is in a valley, that the exposure there would be significant,” says Turner. Although they can’t prove a link, they found double the expected suicide rates between 1997 and 2002.

“There are a lot of people suffering in these places,” says Turner. “Dr. Weisler has opened my eyes to some of the failures in the system that regulates and enforces environmental laws. . . I have felt very angry at times, and at times very hopeless, but I still believe there’s room for change.”

On a cool evening this past spring, Rick Weisler, who is in generally good health, drove back to Milford Hills, where the smells have improved somewhat — because of changes made at Associated Asphalt and other sites. He, however, is still concerned and has with him Shelia Singleton, director of the North Carolina Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, a national support and advocacy organization. Singleton has taken up Weisler’s cause with an evangelist’s zeal. She’s working on a questionnaire about mental illnesses to be given to inhabitants of the area as well as a Web site to find former residents. “It made me angry when they said this isn’t good science. People are suffering,” she says. “You’ve got two counties now with these high rates of suicide — you’d think somebody [in government] would be a little more interested than they are.”

The reason for the trip was a community meeting Weisler and Singleton had called to try to prevent future suicides. Expecting perhaps a dozen or so concerned citizens, they were amazed when nearly 40 people showed up, many of them very apparently depressed.

It didn’t take long for the conversation to heat up. As Weisler and Singleton were presenting their findings, an 81-year-old woman named Doretha Moore interrupted impatiently. She had lived in Milford Hills for years, she said as the room grew hushed, and had worked in the psychiatric ward of the VA hospital on the town’s western border. She described a neighborhood where depression was endemic, and a life in which she accepted it as an inescapable reality. She had steeled herself for the worst. “I felt like if I ever got like that myself, I would be able to take care of myself,” Moore said, wiping her eyes. “But here I am, and I can’t. I’m just not handling this at all. Not at all.”

She had read the articles about Weisler’s making a possible connection to industrial waste. “Being around this toxic place like I was, I think it got into my system and it’s busting me up on the inside,” she said.

Weisler consoled her, to little effect. “We don’t know what’s causing it,” he said about her depression. “It may be a number of things, and it may even improve on its own. . . There is treatment for these illnesses — that’s why we’re here tonight.”

Billie Alexander was in the audience. She made sure to talk to Moore afterward, reassuring her. Alexander has been battling depression herself for years. It’s gotten so bad, she says, that one day this summer she seriously considered suicide herself. “I know it is a sin. But it gets to that point where I think life is too difficult.”

Weisler acknowledges that he has his work cut out for him. Still, he says, “to me there’s a lot of hope mixed in with the sadness, because we have a chance to intervene. If these people are at risk for serious depression because of where they live, we can do something about it”—for example, therapy and medication. “We have an opportunity to save people’s lives.” Even if history proves him wrong about industry’s toxic impact on this community, there is nothing wrong with that goal.