The Impact of Suicidality and Spirituality on Substance Use Day Treatment Discharge

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Although spirituality seems to protect against suicidality and substance misuse, in 2022 81% of United States residents believe in God and yet prevalence of these global health issues are increasing. 12-Step programs are inherently spiritual in their approach to recovery.

Method

We used a clinically mined dataset built from everyday clinical data that a substance use day treatment program in a midwestern state of the USA originally collected for their treatment purposes. Data included information from 444 client files from three day treatment sites within the same agency. Using logistic regression, we analyzed the relationships between suicidality, spirituality, and treatment discharge.

Results

Suicidality and spirituality, including 12-Step involvement prior to treatment, did not have a statistically significant effect on substance use day treatment discharge. However, treatment length and age were associated with completed treatment.

Discussion and Conclusion

While spirituality and suicidality are important concepts with relevance to recovery, they did not affect whether clients completed substance use day treatment. However, because recovery is not just about abstinence or risk reduction, suicidality and spiritually likely have relevance for the overall recovery process.

KEYWORDS:

• Spirituality
• suicidality
• substance use treatment discharge
• 12 step programs
• clinical data-mining

Disclosure statement

During the time of data collection and for a short time afterward, the second author was paid by the organization where the data came from to provide clinical supervision and to consult on occasion. Further, the owner and president at the time of data collection were family relatives. The organization is now under new ownership. There is no financial gain or other incentive tied to the study reported in this manuscript. The study is independent of the clinical support he was paid to provide.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Brigham Young University institutional research committee under IRB2022–067 and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Office of Research and Creative Activities, Brigham Young University