In their commentary, Vahid Shahidi et al 1 provide an interesting point of view on the results of our study entitled: “Impact of unemployment variations on suicide mortality in Western European countries (2000–2010)”.2 Nevertheless, their analysis reveals some misunderstanding of our paper. First, the authors explain that unemployment is endogenous to the economic crisis and, thus, trying to capture the effect of unemployment on suicide mortality independently from other features of the economic crisis may not be relevant, more specifically because the effect of unemployment rate changes may vary according to these other features. We do not deny the possible presence of what could be modelled as an interaction. However, such …