Young et al. BMC Public Health 2011, 11:874 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/11/874 least in this cohort. We plan to replicate this analysis using more general measures of mental health, which should provide additional power to explore such interac- tions [23]. Policy implications & conclusions Currently, there is growing social and political pressure to allow both denominational (alternatively called faith schools), and independent (private or fee paying) schools greater freedom in shaping their own ‘ethos and values’ and our results may have potentially serious implications for school policy. Two extreme policies are sometimes proposed; the first is a return to religious segregation within schools; this may reduce the levels of anomie, but is problematic in terms of promoting diversity and tolerance agendas. The second is the removal of all reli- gious distinctions within school; while this may also lower levels of anomie, many parents and religious lea- ders are strongly committed to retaining denominational (faith) schools, and any steps to remove religious organi- sations from the educational system are likely to be characterised as an infringement of civil freedom and parental choice. A ‘middle way’ would be to continue with current practice, but consider ‘religiously mis- matched’ young people at increased risk for suicidality and, where possible, schools could implement policies to minimise the mismatch between the values of the pupils and school. In practice, this is difficult to implement since pupils may ‘home in’ on such distinctions and such policies risk further emphasising existing differ- ences. Policies which aim to strengthen concepts such as school connectedness as a prophylactic are uncontro- versial and this study offers additional supporting evi- dence for their efficacy [18]. Although our results make intuitive sense and are highly compatible with both Durkheim’s anomic and Joiner’s ITS account of suicide and are broadly in-line the E-TM framework, we are appropriately cautious in our conclusion. While we speculate about policy impli- cations, this is a single study from a location with a his- tory of sectarianism and how generalizable these findings are beyond the ‘West of Scotland’ context has yet to be established. Additional material Additional file 1: Table S1. Suicide risk score Relationship between individual items and suicidality score. Additional file 2: Table S2: Factor analysis of 11 ‘perceptions of neighborhood’ items. Acknowledgements We thank Wolfgang Markham for commenting on a draft manuscript. Page 14 of 15 Authors’ contributions RY wrote the manuscript, conceived the theoretical approach taken in the paper, participated in design of the final phase of the 11-16/16+ Study, and performed the statistical analysis. HS co-conceived the original 11-16/16+ Study, participated in its design and coordination and contributed to drafting the manuscript. AE contributed to the neighbourhoods section of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Competing interests All authors are supported financially by the Medical Research Council of Great Britain. RY and AE as part of the Neighbourhoods and Health (WBS U.1300.00.009) and HS as part of the Gender and Health program (WBS U.1300.00.004). The authors declare no competing interests. Received: 28 January 2011 Accepted: 17 November 2011 Published: 17 November 2011 References 1. Gould MS, Greenberg T, Velting DM, Shaffer D: Youth suicide risk and preventive interventions: a review of the past 10 years. 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