Suicide Protective Factors in Outpatient Substance Abuse Patients: Religious Faith and Family Support

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to identify the protective roles of religious faith and family support in buffering against suicidal behavior in a sample of substance abuse outpatients seeking treatment. Data were collected from 112 clinical outpatients seeking treatment for substance abuse. We hypothesized that religious faith would be related to lower levels of suicidal behavior through a negative association with depressive symptoms. We expected this mediation effect would differ across varying levels of family support, providing support for a moderated mediation effect. The results indicate that religious faith exerts stronger direct and indirect effects on suicidal behavior at low levels of family support. Religious faith was significantly and negatively related to suicidal behavior only at low levels of family support. The findings suggest that in the absence of family support, religious faith may play a compensatory role in protecting against suicidal behavior.

Notes

¹ The distribution of the SBQR scores demonstrated a slight departure from normality: skewness = 2.72; kurtosis = 6.81. Therefore, we also reran our main analyses using square root transformed scores for SBQR. The results were substantially similar to those reported in our main results.