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Life sucks, Manhattan. Get used to it.
The world’s most bustling island has one of the lowest rates of premature death in the nation, but those same city dwellers aren’t enjoying their longevity because they’re plagued with physical- and mental-health issues, a new study finds.
“People in Manhattan are living longer but not better,” said Dr. Patrick Remington of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, which conducted the study with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“[Manhattan] has a lot of people that say they don’t feel very good.”
The annual study ranked the overall health of every county in the nation, then compared it to other counties statewide.
To determine a county’s health, researchers crafted a formula that equally weighed how long residents lived and the quality of that life.
Researchers judged quality of life on what people reported about their mental and physical health, as well as mortality rates.
The conventional wisdom is that counties with low mortality rates have healthy, vigorous residents.
Leave it to Manhattan to buck that trend.
Despite having low premature-death rates — in the bottom 10 percent in the nation — Manhattan residents overwhelmingly reported being in poor mental and physical health.
In one quality-of-life indicator, a hefty 19 percent of Manhattan residents reported being in poor or fair health. That’s almost twice the national average of 10 percent.
Overall, Manhattan ranked 25th in the state.
The Bronx had a different problem. It was saddled with a high premature-death rate and a low quality of life. It ranked dead last of New York’s 62 counties.
Queens County came in at number 20, while Staten Island (Richmond County) was 28 and Brooklyn (Kings) was 58 in the overall rankings.
The study found the healthiest county in the state was leafy Putnam.