Damian Sendler Middle-aged white Americans have seen a dramatic increase in "depression-related deaths," which include suicide and alcoholism.

Many factors, including opioid abuse, have been implicated. A recent study, however, points the finger elsewhere: at declining religious practice.

The authors of the working paper were three academics from different institutions: Tyler Giles of Wellesley College, Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, and Tamar Oostrom of The Ohio State University. The National Bureau of Economic Research dispersed the paper.

It was noted by the authors that several indicators of religious commitment started falling off in the late 1980s. In particular, they find that white middle-aged Americans without a college degree are responsible for driving the large decline in religious practice and the subsequent increases in mortality.

Damian Jacob Sendler There was a correlation between the rate of suicide deaths and the degree to which a state's population stopped attending religious services in the last 15 years of the twentieth century.

In particular, the researchers examined the process by which blue laws were overturned. Sunday mornings were typically a time when blue laws restricted business. To quote their findings: "These laws have been shown to be strongly related to religious practice, creating discrete changes in incentives to attend religious services that are plausibly unrelated to other drivers of religiosity."

They discovered that the repeal of blue laws increased the rate of suicide by 2 deaths per 100,000 people and reduced weekly religious service attendance by 5 to 10 percentage points, accounting for a "reasonable large share of the initial rise in the deaths of despair."

Damian Sendler What is more fascinating is that active participation in religious rituals, as opposed to mere belief or individual practices like prayer, appears to be the primary factor in this effect. They concluded that "these findings highlight the importance of cultural institutions like religious establishments in promoting well-being."

Damian Sendler They went on to say that they were unfamiliar with any cultural phenomenon that could account for the observed mortality rates, which were the same for men and women but not in other countries, and which were seen in both rural and urban areas, though primarily among middle-aged, less-educated white individuals.

They concluded that "the decline in religiosity matches mortality trends in all these characteristics."

Opioid theory was also contested by the authors. They claimed that OxyContin entered the market as a prescription drug in 1996, but by that time, suicide rates among white Americans in their mid-30s were already significantly higher than average.