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Lower suicide rates found in women who frequently attend religious service

Frequent religious service attendance was associated with significantly lower rates of suicide among a large cohort of women.

“Although there have been numerous studies of the association between various forms of religious participation and suicide, most have serious methodological limitations,” Tyler J. VanderWeele, PhD, of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues wrote. “To our knowledge, only one study to date has used cohort data to examine the association between religious service attendance and suicide itself, but it was not able to control for depressive symptoms, which are related to both suicide and religious service attendance.”

Tyler J. VanderWeele

To identify longitudinal associations between religious service attendance and suicide, researchers analyzed a long-term prospective cohort from the Nurses’ Health Study of 89,708 women. Religious service attendance was self-reported in 1992 and 1996, and associations were analyzed from 1996 through June 2010. Study participants were aged 30 to 55 years.

Attendance at religious services once per week or more was associated with an approximate 5-fold lower rate of suicide, compared with never attending religious services (HR = 0.16; 95% CI, 0.06-0.46).

Compared with less frequent attendance, service attendance once or more per week was associated with a hazard ratio of 0.05 (95% CI, 0.006-0.48) among Catholics and 0.34 (95% CI, 0.1-1.1) among Protestants (P = .05).

Harold G. Koenig

Some evidence indicated social integration, depressive symptoms and alcohol consumption partially mediate the association among participants occasionally attending services, but not among those attending frequently.

“What should mental health professionals do with this information? Evaluating patients’ moral beliefs about suicide and level of involvement in religious community may help clinicians gauge risk of suicide. Thus, the findings by VanderWeele et al underscore the importance of obtaining a spiritual history as part of the overall psychiatric evaluation, which may identify patients who at one time were active in a faith community but have stopped for various reasons,” Harold G. Koenig, MD, of Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, wrote in an accompanying editorial. “Exploring what those reasons were, particularly among the socially isolated, and perhaps supporting a return to such activity, if the patient desires, may help produce social connections that lower suicide risk.” – by Amanda Oldt

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.