You Don't Say!

Reuters has a flash report from the land of the bloody obvious:

Depressed men and women who consider themselves affiliated with a religion are less likely to attempt suicide than their non-religious counterparts, according to new study findings.

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Overall, men and women who said they belonged to a religion had a history of less suicide attempts than those who reported no religious affiliation, Oquendo and her team report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Specifically, 48 percent of patients affiliated with Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism or other religion reported having attempted suicide, compared with 66 percent of those with no religious affiliation.

Religious patients also reported experiencing less suicidal thoughts than did their non-religious peers, despite similar high scores on assessments of depression and hopelessness.

The elephant in the room that this article doesn’t mention, of course, are those religions which encourage suicide.

But that being said, as Jonah wrote a few years ago:

If you were to read any one of the stories I cited at the beginning of this column