Dr. Shneidman evaluated each of these Terman participants on two dimensions. The first was one he called “perturbation,” a measure of the person’s level of agitation, disturbance, and lack of composure. This measure included a focus on the man’s early relationships with his parents; his level of life success or failure; and the presence of the markers of poor mental health, such as alcoholism, depression, and instability.
Shneidman’s second dimension was something he called “lethality,” which included features of the man’s life that reflected his likely intentions about his death. This could be recent anticipations of trouble, thoughts or premonitions of accidents or death, or disappointments with accomplishments. (One of the Terman subjects, for example, reported at age twenty-nine that he now believed that his early intellectual gifts had been merely a flash in the pan.) After reviewing the prepared biographies, and evaluating perturbation and lethality, Shneidman used his clinical judgment to rank the thirty men included in his analysis in order of the likelihood of their suicide.
Dr. Shneidman’s accuracy was striking. His rankings placed all five of the actual suicides in his top six most likely suicides. He was not using numeric data put through a discriminant analysis, as was done in the study of female Terman suicides, but his clinical judgments were correct. He was able to capture those aspects of the men’s lives that foretold their later suicide.
The men who shot themselves thought that something important was missing in their lives. They drew from that a bigger conclusion—that their lives were not worth living. In addition to their unstable lives, their disappointment in their achievements—the discrepancy between what they aspired to do and what they actually accomplished—weighed very heavily on these men, and they believed all was lost. These beliefs are very similar to the catastrophizing that our studies have shown to correlate more broadly with early death from violent causes.
By the way, it is interesting to note that when Dr. Shneidman was not studying suicide, he was studying the novels and essays of the dark romance novelist Herman Melville. He especially loved Moby-Dick. Whenever the protagonist in Moby-Dick feels a damp, drizzly November in his soul and involuntarily pauses before coffin warehouses, it is high time to get to sea as soon as he can. But in real life, Melville’s own son Malcolm shot himself and died. Shneidman, Melville, and Douglas Kelley shared a fascination with the deeper existential issues of catastrophizing thoughts.
Thoughts in Old Age
The reason Ed Shneidman had telephoned us was that he had learned of our ongoing work with the Terman participants, and he wanted to send us the audiotapes of the in-depth interviews he had conducted with Terman men late in life—in the 1980s—when both he and the subjects were over age seventy. Dr. Shneidman was living in Los Angeles, as were forty-five of the Terman men. He saw the men every year or so through 1987 (about seven years), mostly asking them about their lives. One particularly fascinating report he wrote focused on eleven of these Terman men who were lawyers (or retired lawyers).
Shneidman transcribed all the interview responses of these eleven participants, across fifty-one interview sessions and 241,985 words. He analyzed the frequencies of all the words they used in their responses to his open-ended questions. He felt their vocabulary would provide some insight into how these aging men thought about their lives.
The men who were in this group were generally successful and relatively healthy for their age. Most were still working (at least part-time) into their seventies and early eighties. We knew that catastrophizing tended to predict who would die prematurely, but what thought style was predominant among those who aged successfully?
Perhaps not surprisingly, these older men, who were still able and eager to contribute to society, willing to participate in Shneidman’s interviews, and capable of reflecting on their lives, did not sound like catatastrophizers at all. The most prominent conversation topics—based both on the number of different words used and on the total number of occurrences of words related to that topic—were occupation, family, and health.
But then came a bombshell of an insight: over all the interviews with these older men (almost a quarter of a million words), not a single man ever spoke the word death in reference to his own inevitable demise. A few times they used the word death when mentioning the recent death of a friend, but mostly they talked about their work and their families. Some talked a great deal about their health (and about their own efforts and the efforts of their doctors to maintain their health), but their utterances revealed that they did not focus on death. They talked about their lives, not about their deaths.
Does this mean that the secret to long life is making sure never to talk about death? Not any more than the secret to long life is watching funny TV shows. The ways the long-lived Terman participants thought about and interpreted their lives were part of their healthy patterns, patterns that developed and deepened over many years.
Any Regrets?
In 1986, when the Terman participants who were still alive were about seventy-five years old, they filled out a questionnaire that included an open-ended question: “What choices would you make differently if you had the opportunity to live life again?” Their answers provide further insight into the thinking of the participants, as they looked back over their lives. Researchers at Cornell University performed one detailed analysis of these answers.30
Dr. Shneidman’s work had revealed that the discrepancy between what the Terman men aspired to do professionally and what they actually did weighed very heavily on the men who were contemplating (and eventually committed) suicide. Would the Terman participants who lived to old age therefore have few regrets? The septuagenarian Terman participants’ responses in 1986 were coded in terms of whether the regrets—the things they wished they had done differently—were mostly about actions they had taken. Examples of commonly regretted actions were marrying too young, smoking and drinking too much, and focusing too much on career. Or were they okay with what they had done but concerned about actions they had failed to take? Commonly regretted inactions were not completing college or graduate school, not working hard enough in school, not aiming high enough in their career, and not emphasizing social relationships enough.
It turned out that there was a very strong predominance of regretting inactions—opportunities lost—over regretting actions. Rather than thinking about whether they had worked too hard on their careers, they wondered about other careers they might have enjoyed.
In other words, the individuals in this late-life sample of Terman participants were reflecting generally positive thoughts about life. These older men had survived to their midseventies in good enough physical and mental health to be filling out questionnaires. When they looked back over their lives, they didn’t perceive that things had turned out so badly for them—for the most part, as life went on, they didn’t regret what they had done. But they thought that their lives could have been even better if they had taken even further advantage of the opportunities they had confronted.
30
The Cornell research on the regrets of the Terman participants is in N. Hattaiangadi, V. H. Medvec, and T. Gilovich, “Failing to Act: Regrets of Terman’s Geniuses,”