Nothing in between: a multi-faith response to the paper on religion and suicide

[...]the absence of any intermediate data between baseline and the end of the study period makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the potential link between religious service attendance and suicide - hence the title of our letter, ‘Nothing in between’. [...]this lack of intermediate data might stem from the fact that Kleiman & Liu’s study seems to have ‘piggy-backed’ onto a separate, pre-existing epidemiological survey, 4 the primary objective of which was not the investigation of the relationship between religiosity and suicide. [...]the two are closely related, with previous suicide attempts a sufficiently well-recognised risk factor for suicide completion that it has been controlled for as a potential confounder in Kleiman & Liu’s study, even though it was not found to be ‘a significant predictor of death by suicide’. [...]in the clinical setting, suicide attempts are one of the primary risk events of concern, but the study does not provide information on how religious service attendance might relate to these - information which could be of considerable relevance for risk assessment.