From DAVE DUNCAN
In your 17 April supplement, ‘Mind and Body’, Susan Katz Miller suggests
that women tend to become depressed because they require an average of 9.75
hours’ sleep per day, while men can get by on 8.4 hours.
Even if women are awake less of the time, though, they live longer. Current
life expectancies at birth are 79.73 years for women, 73.04 years for men
(1992 Canadian data).
Thus men have a ‘wakefulness expectancy’ of 47.476 years, versus women’s
47.34 years. This difference is less than 0.3 per cent, or about two months.
It really does not seem worth getting depressed about.
Dave Duncan
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
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