Religious community associated with fewer deaths from suicide, drug, and alcohol

Religious community associated with fewer deaths from suicide, drug, and alcohol

Tyler J. VanderWeele Ph.D.

Our study examined 66,492 women from the Nurses’ Health Study II and 43,141 men from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, following them for roughly two decades. We examined whether attending religious services was associated with a lower likelihood of death due to suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol in the roughly 20 years that followed. We controlled for numerous other characteristics including age, race, geographic region, income, health status, health behaviors, smoking, mental health, other forms of social support, and numerous other variables as well.

The women in the Nurses’ Health Study II were followed from 2001, when religious service attendance was assessed, all the way through 2017. Compared to those who never attended religious services, participants who attended at least once a week were 68 percent less likely to die by suicide, drug overdose or alcohol, during the 16 years that followed. This was true even after controlling for a potentially wide range of confounding factors. For the men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, followed from 1988 through 2014, those attending weekly, compared to not at all, were 33 percent less likely to die by suicide, drug overdose or alcohol, during the 26 years that they were followed. Our paper considered a wide range of sensitivity analyses to see if the results varied much based on different ways of analyzing and looking at the data and the results were quite consistent. These reductions in deaths are substantial. The reductions are of such a magnitude that they were covered in the headlines of the Harvard Gazette. Associations of this magnitude are worth considering further.

Our study was not able to examine the mechanisms by which religious services seemed to prevent these deaths of despair. We will try to examine this in subsequent work. However, a number of mechanisms do seem plausible. Social relationships formed within a religious community may help provide support and encouragement when individuals face problems and are confronted with despair. Religious communities may also foster a sense of greater purpose that helps during times of struggle. Religious teachings on the value and inherent worth and dignity of each and every life, and teachings that suicide is therefore wrong, likewise likely contribute.