Religion, Spirituality, and Suicidality

Suicidality can be seen as one of the possible responses to circumstances that challenge one’s regular ways of searching for and making meaning. These ways may suffice in less distressing conditions, but they frequently fail in more challenging situations. How and when do religiousness and spirituality, providing sources and structures of meaning, protect against suicidality? What dimensions contribute to lower or even higher suicidality? This series presents multidisciplinary approaches to the scientific study of mental health and religion. This fifth volume explores the dynamics of the interrelations of suicidality, religiousness, spirituality, and partly meaning-making, in the context of clinical psychiatry. It contains six scientific reports, ranging from literature reviews to highly intensive longitudinal research using the experience sampling method. Religiousness, spirituality, and meaning in life can exhibit an attenuating as well as a reinforcing effect on suicidality, with different dimensions functioning differently between individuals and their cultural and spiritual contexts. Several aspects of religiousness and spirituality prove to be dynamic, both over time and in their interrelations with suicidality. In general, religiousness, spirituality, and meaning-making are found to have a protective character against suicidality.