Study links church attendance to reduction in suicide risk for American women

Against a grim backdrop of rising suicide rates among American women, new research has revealed that one group of women — practicing Catholics — appears to have bucked a national trend toward despair and self-harm.

Compared with women who never participated in religious services, women who attended any religious service at least once a week were five times less likely to commit suicide between 1996 and 2010, according to a study recently published by JAMA Psychiatry.

It’s not clear how widely the findings can be applied to a diverse population of American women. In a study population made up of nurses and dominated by women who identified themselves as either Catholic or Protestant, the suicide rate was about half that of U.S. women as a whole. Of 89,708 participants ages 30 to 55, 36 committed suicide at some point over the next 15 years.

The women’s church attendance was not the only factor; which church they attended mattered as well. Protestant women who attended church weekly were far less likely to take their own lives than were women who seldom or never attended services. But these same Protestant women were still seven times more likely to die by their own hand than were their Catholic counterparts.

Among devout Catholic women — those in church more than once a week — suicide was essentially nonexistent. There was not a single suicide among the 6,999 Catholic women who said they attended Mass more than once a week.

But the effect of religion was not a simple matter of group identity: Self-identified Catholics who did not attend Mass committed suicide nearly as often as women who were not active worshippers.

The authors suggested that attendance at religious services is “a form of meaningful social participation” that buffers women against loneliness and isolation — both factors that are strongly implicated in depression and suicide.

“Religion and spirituality may be an underappreciated resource that psychiatrists and clinicians could explore with their patients, as appropriate,” wrote a team of researchers led by Tyler J. Vander Weele of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The study comes just two months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documented a steep rise in suicides in the United States between 1994 and 2014. Suicide rates climbed among men and women and in all age groups between 10 and 74. Although women remain much less likely than men to commit suicide, the CDC found that that gap is closing.