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Hope deferred maketh a sick heart
But desire fulfilled is as the Tree of Life.
Little things say a lot: psychoanalysts turn out to have extremely low mortality rates, lower than almost any other occupation.
This finding is reported in the following paper by Edward Jeffery. The study compares the mortality rates of male psychoanalysts to that of white American males generally, and to those of other occupations for the thirty-year period 1953-1982, a period for which data were available. Jeffery found that psychoanalysts have a mortality rate 48 percent lower than that of the male population at large, which means that in a given year they have half the chance of dying as has the average American male.
The magnitude of this difference is impressive. It is measured using the standardized mortality ratio (SMR), in which an actual death rate of a group forms the numerator, and the death rate of a comparable population the denominator (the higher the SMR, the higher the death rate). According to Jeffery, the SMR for male analysts was within the lowest 4 percent among the 124 white male occupational groups listed in “Mortality by Occupation and Industry,” a U.S. government publication.
This finding is not attributable simply to the fact that analysts have higher-than-average educational and income levels, two factors that correlate with lower mortality. The psychoanalysts in the study were also physicians, yet had lower mortality rates than physicians with comparable years of education, and similar or even higher incomes.
The analysts in the study had all qualified as physicians, as psychiatrists, and as psychoanalysts accredited in the American Psychoanalytic Association. But these psychiatrist analysts had significantly lower