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It sounds like I misread you. You're more empirical than I gave you credit for. But that gives you a tendency to trust excessively in the anecdotal. Look at what you said here:

Alcohol and cigarettes are relatively safe -- you see smokers and drinkers who are in their 80s.

If you look at scientifically sound studies of long-term tobacco and alcohol abuse (see here and here to get pointed in the right direction), you'll see that the long-term consequences are clear as day. Sure, you sometimes meet an octogenarian smoker, but you also meet a lot of 50 year-old long-term smokers with emphysema and/or small-cell lung cancer. Show me one example of a person who got cancer from any antidepressant (again, let's talk MAOIs and tricyclics because they've been around a lot longer), let alone a controlled study showing any such trend, and I'll concede the point. Until then let's get back to reality.

You also complain that psychotherapy hasn't been brought under the purview of the scientific process; that depends completely on what kind of psychotherapy you're talking about. Cognitive therapy, for instance, _is_ psychotherapy. It is a subset of psychotherapy. Other subsets include behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and psychoanalysis, which is admittedly unempirical. I'm glad you did get at least some talk therapy in; and from what you say it sounds as though it helped you get a grip on things. Good deal. At least one of the approaches I've mentioned work for most people. I myself am very much about CBT rather than psychoanalysis, but that's just because I'm a skeptical bastard.

You had a rough time because you had to deal with a pill-happy psychiatrist, by far the worst kind. But antidepressants have their place in the treatment of depression for some people, and double-blind studies have proven their effectiveness and safety. Decades of use? We have no idea what that will do because most of the newer stuff hasn't been around for more than 10 years. But tricyclics and MAOIs have, and long-term abusers (I say that because none except the most severely depressed should be on medication for more than 2 years anyway) of those drugs definitely don't suffer anywhere near what smokers or drinkers do except for very occasional cases of hepatic dysplasia, about what light drinking will do to you after a lifetime. Predict away about what will happen to a patient treated with bupropion for 30 years, sir, but it's all Xenu and thetans until you have a rational basis for saying so.

Here is an Acrobat PDF file with history of passing percentages from the Society of Actuaries web site:
http://www.soa.org/ccm/cms-service/stream/asset?as set_id=20512065

That report was huge. And so much detail. Page after page of statistics. Chart after chart of numbers. So many numbers. Eyes glazing. Falling.asleep

Good business sense is more important than math skills for a successful actuary. The math gets you past the first few actuarial exams, but a high level of general intelligence is required to pass the rest of the exams.

The exams are VERY competitive. Here is an Acrobat PDF file with history of passing percentages from the Society of Actuaries web site: http://www.soa.org/ccm/cms-service/stream/asset?as set_id=20512065

In the good ole days, most of the actuarial jobs for the life insurance industry were in the northeast. I am happy to report that snow isn't an issue any more. There are lots of actuarial jobs everywhere.

And there of lots of different types of actuarial jobs:
life insurance
health insurance
pension plans

I am a pension actuary.