Tag: religion

Reading of the Week: Help-seeking & Gambling – the New CMAJ Study; Also, Women With Schizophrenia, and Dr. Campo on Patients & Faith

June 18, 2026 /

From the Editor

Can Argentina repeat? Could England end its six-decade drought? Roughly five billion people will watch this year’s World Cup. The tournament can be understood in different ways: a great sporting event, a giant party, and, yes, a huge draw for gamblers. In Ontario – and across North America – recent laws have dramatically expanded gambling options. How have such changes affected problem gambling and the need for help? 

In a new CMAJ study, Ryan Forrest (of the University of Toronto) and his co-authors attempt to answer that question. They drew on Ontario data to quantify the increase in help-seeking following the launch of a government-operated online gambling platform in January 2015 and the subsequent expansion of private online gambling. They analyzed almost 750 000 contacts to a helpline over 13 years, finding that the mean monthly rate of gambling-related contacts nearly doubled. “The rapid expansion and privatization of online gambling, including single-event sports betting, in Ontario were respectively associated with marked increases in gambling-related helpline contacts, specifically among adolescent boys and young men.” We consider the paper and its implications.

In the second selection, from JAMA Psychiatry, Laura M. Rowland (of the University of Maryland) and Dr. Ellen E. Lee (of the University of California San Diego) write about schizophrenia and women. “The lack of focused health research on women in general is well recognized, and mental health research remains no exception. Surprisingly, there is also a lack of mental health research on older people with schizophrenia with less than 5% of scientific publications on schizophrenia dedicated to this older group.”

Finally, in the third selection, Dr. John V. Campo (of Johns Hopkins University) discusses faith and psychiatry. In a personal essay for The Washington Post, he notes his own religious experience and declining health. “Taking our patients seriously requires physicians to explore issues of ultimate concern, suggesting that a spiritual history should be an expected component of any comprehensive clinical evaluation.”

DG

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Reading of the Week: Suicide and Religion

July 2, 2015 /

The relationship between religion and suicide was first established in Emile Durkheim’s 19th-century seminal treatise. This has since been corroborated in different countries,most recently by Swiss researchers who used a year 2000 census-based cohort study to show that such risk patterns still persisted, with risk highest for those with no religious affiliation, lowest for Roman Catholics and intermediate for Protestants. Why religion should exhibit this protective effect is less clear: Durkheim attributed it to the sense of community that arises from active church membership, with attendance the most commonly cited attribute. Others, however, emphasise the moral and religious objections to suicide,although Durkheim was at pains to rule this out as an explanation. Perhaps a more pertinent question is why, given increasing societal secularisation, does the relationship between religion and suicide still seem to persist? Increasing secularization is also evident in Switzerland, where by the end of the 1990s nonpractising Christians made up almost half the population, and a further 11% cited no religious affiliation. This has led many social researchers, including some in Switzerland, to conclude that affiliation bears little correspondence to religious belief or practice but is more likely to reflect a diverse set of traditions or social convenience.

So begins a new paper from the British Journal of Psychiatry looking at what seems to be a very old and established relationship: religion and suicide. This is heavily treed ground, as the above quotation suggests, with work going back to Durkheim’s 1897 book.

Emile Durkheim

I remember medical school and residency conversations on this topic of religion and suicide, referencing Durkheim. Though people debated the reasons, this much seemed to be taken for granted: religion bestows a protective quality on its followers. For Durkheim, the thinking was that church attendance – highest among the Catholics – provided the advantage.

In “Religion and the risk of suicide: longitudinal study of over 1 million people,” Dermot O’Reilly and Michael Rosato focus on Northern Ireland, drawing on census data.

Dr. Dermot O’Reilly

It’s a short, clever study. It also raises a simple question: is Durkheim’s thinking dated?

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