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Suicide
Durkheim used official statistics to carry out a study into suicide. He found that people
who are not integrated into the society that they live in are more likely to kill themselves.
He stated that there are four types of suicide.
Egoistic suicides
This is where people kill themselves for their own individual interest. This usually occurs
in societies where social bonds are weak with a low level of social integration due to
emphasis put onto individual rights, welfare and interests. You could say that this society
has the norms and values to think of themselves, causing them to be more individual
rather than coming together as a society. These people are often encouraged (for
example, by their religions) to make their own decisions and therefore accept the
consequences. This may mean that other people of the society see it as acceptable that a
person has killed themselves due to failure or unhappiness. To conclude this type of
suicide is caused by a low amount of social integration and could lead to a high suicide
rate in that society.
Altruistic suicides
This occurs in societies that sees the individual needs as less important than the societies
as a whole. As individual interest was not important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic
society there would be little reason for people to commit suicide. He stated one
exception; if the individual is expected to kill themselves on behalf of the society. An
example of this rare type of suicide would be suicide bombers who are willing to take
their lives for their religions and Hindu widows throwing themselves on their husbands
funeral pyre.
Anomic suicides
For this type of suicide, Durkheim pointed out that people are naturally selfish and put
their own needs and interests first. He said that there is a framework of 'acceptable
behaviour' within a society and if this framework is weakened then people will revert to
their natural selfishness. These restraints are usually weakened by social change so
Durkheim linked social change with the rate of suicide.
Fatalistic suicides
This type of suicide seems to occur in overly oppressive societies, causing people to
prefer to die than to carry on living within this society. This is an extremely rare reason
for people to take their own lives, but a good example would be within a prison; people
prefer to die than live in a prison with constant abuse. [4]
Suicide was one of the groundbreaking books in the field of sociology. Written by French
sociologist Émile Durkheim and published in 1897 it was a case study of suicide, a
publication unique for its time which provided an example of what the sociological
monograph should look like.
Theory
Most contemporary studies of suicide focused on individual characteristics. Durkheim
studied connections between individuals and society. He believed that if he could show
how what is seen as the most individual act is actually the result of the social world, he
would show the usefulness of sociology and his rules of the sociological method. In this
book Durkheim developed the concept of anomie. He explores the differing suicide rates
among Protestants and Catholics, explaining that stronger social control among Catholics
results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of
attachment to their groups, which he calls social integration. Abnormally high or low
levels of social integration may result in increased suicide rates; low levels have this
effect because low social integration results in disorganised society, causing people to
turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to avoid
becoming burdens on society. This work has influenced proponents of control theory, and
is often mentioned as a classic sociological study.
Findings
Durkheim found out that:
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Suicide rates are higher for those widowed, single and divorced than married.
Suicide rates are higher for people without children than with children.
Suicide rates are higher among Protestants than Catholics.
[edit] Reasons for Differing Rates
Reasons for these differing suicide rates include:
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Most importantly, the coroner's interpretation of the death in question. Due to
slight differences between Protestants and Catholics—specifically because suicide
is a mortal sin for Catholics—the coroner in a Catholic country is less likely to
record the death as a suicide. Take into account that if no suicide note is left, it is
all down to the coroner's interpretation.
Catholic countries tend to be slightly more integrated than Protestant, with closer
family ties. The province of Québec, in Canada, is a dramatic paradox to this
affirmation. While officially Catholic, it has a suicide rate per capita, especially
amongst its youth, that is alarming, which is attributed to the rapid downfall of the
actual communal practise of religion. Similarly, people who are married and/or
have children are less likely to suicide. Simply put, they have more to live for.
According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while
Protestant society has low levels. Durkheim thus defined suicide as the act of severing
social relationships and concluded that suicide may be caused by weak social bonds.
Durkheim believed that the social bond is composed of two factors, which are social
integration (attachment to other individuals within society) and social regulation
(attachment to society's norms). He believed that suicide rates may increase when
extremities in these factors occur.
[edit] Types of Suicide
He differentiated between four types of suicide:
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Egoistic suicide: Egoism is a state in which the ties attaching the individual to
others in the society are weak. Since the individual is only weakly integrated into
the society, their suicide will have little impact on the rest of the society. In other
words, there are few social ties to keep the individual from taking their own life.
This Durkheim saw as the cause of suicide among divorced men, and has been
cited as the cause of rising teenage suicides by contemporary sociologists.
Altruistic suicide: Altruism is a state opposite to egoism, in which the individual
is extremely attached to the society and thus has no life of their own. Individuals
who commit suicide based on altruism die because they believe that their death
can bring about a benefit to the society. In other words, when an individual is too
heavily integrated into the society, they will commit suicide regardless of their
own hesitation if the society's norms ask for the person's death. Durkheim saw
this as occurring in two different ways:
o Where people saw themselves as worthless or a burden upon society and
would therefore commit suicide. He saw this as happening in ancient or
'primitive' societies, but also in highly traditionalised army regiments, such
as imperial or elite guards, in contemporary society.
o Where people saw the social world as meaningless and would sacrifice
themselves for a greater ideal. Durkheim saw this as happening in 'Eastern'
religions, such as the Sati in Hinduism. Some contemporary sociologists
have used this analysis to explain Kamikaze pilots and the cult of the
suicide bomber.
Anomic suicide: Anomie is a state in which there is weak social regulation
between the society's norms and the individual, most often brought on by
dramatic changes in economic and/or social circumstances. This type of suicide
happens when the social norms and laws governing the society do not correspond
with the life goals of the individual. Since the individual does not identify with
the norms of the society, suicide seems to be a way to escape them. Examples
include the spike in suicide rates following the 1929 Stock Market Crash in the
United States - refuted by john kenneth galbraith in his book "The Great Crash:
1929" with a May, 1929 NY Times article,
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00812FE3B54167A93C3AA178
ED85F4D8285F9 noting the suicide rate in 1928, the year before the 1929 crash,
had already risen to 17.5 per 100,000 in many cities, with the rate noted to be 17
per 100,000 in the years subsequent to the crash in
http://www.nps.gov/archive/elro/glossary/great-depression.htm , - as well as the
spike following John F. Kennedy's assassination and the September 11th attacks.
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Fatalistic suicide: Fatalism is a state opposite to anomie in which social regulation
is completely instilled in the individual; there is no hope of change against the
oppressive discipline of the society. The only way for the individual to be released
from this state is to commit suicide. Durkheim saw this as the reason for slaves
committing suicide in antiquity, but saw it as having little relevance in modern
society. Contemporary sociologists have argued that modern fatalistic suicide
occurs in such societies as Japan, where social mobility is so limited by social
norms that individual fulfillment is impossible.
"Collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic
forces, though of another sort; they, likewise, affect the individual from without..."
(Thompson, 1982, p. 109 [excerpt from Suicide])
Suicide, Durkheim's third major work, is of great importance because it is his first serious
effort to establish an empericism in sociology, an empiricism that would provide a
sociological explanation for a phenomenon traditionally regarded as exclusively
psychological and individualistic.
Durkheim proposed this definition of suicide: "the term suicide is applied to all cases of
death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself,
which he knows wil produce this result" (1982, p. 110 [excerpt from Suicide]). Durkheim
used this definition to separate true suicides from accidental deaths. He then collected
several European nations' suicide rate statistics, which proved to be relatively constant
among those nations and among smaller demographics within those nations. Thus, a
collective tendency towards suicide was discovered.
Of equal importance to his methodology, Durkheim drew theoretical conclusions on the
social causes of suicide. He proposed four types of suicide, based on the degrees of
imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation.
Egoisitic suicide resulted from too little social integration. Those individuals who were
not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions,
norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to
commit suicide on an increased basis. An example Durkheim discovered was that of
unmarried people, particularly males, who, with less to bind and connect them to stable
social norms and goals, committed suicide at higher rates than unmarried people.
The second type, Altruistic suicide, was a result of too much integration. It occurred at
the opposite end of the integration scale as egoistic suicide. Self sacrifice was the
defining trait, where individuals were so integrated into social groups that they lost sight
of their individuality and became willing to sacrifice themselves to the group's interests,
even if that sacrifice was their own life. The most common cases of altruistic suicide
occurred among members of the military.
On the second scale, that of moral regulation, lies the other two forms of suicide, the first
of which is Anomic suicide, located on the low end. Anomic suicide was of particular
interest to Durkheim, for he divided it into four categories: acute and chronic economic
anomie, and acute and chronic domestic anomie. Each involved an imbalance of means
and needs, where means were unable to fulfill needs.
Each category of anomic suicide can be described briefly as follows:
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Acute economic anomie: sporadic decreases in the ability of traditional institutions
(such as religion, guilds, pre-industrial social systems, etc.) to regulate and fulfill
social needs.
Chronic economic anomie: long term dimunition of social regulation. Durkheim
identified this type with the ongoing industrial revolution, which eroded
traditional social regulators and often failed to replace them. Industrial goals of
wealth and property were insufficient in providing happiness, as was
demonstrated by higher suicide rates among the wealthy than among the poor.
Acute domestic anomie: sudden changes on the microsocial level resulted in an
inability to adapt and therefore higher suicide rates. Widowhood is a prime
example of this type of anomie.
Chronic domestic anomie: referred to the way marriage as an institution regulated
the sexual and behavioral means-needs balance among men and women. Marriage
provided different regulations for each, however. Bachelors tended to commit
suicide at higher rates than married men because of a lack of regulation and
established goals and expectations. On the other hand, marriage has traditionally
served to overregulate the lives of women by further restricting their already
limited opportunities and goals. Unmarried women, therefore, do not experience
chronic domestic anomie nearly as often as do unmarried men.
The final type of suicide is Fatalistic suicide, "at the high extreme of the regulation
continuum" (1982, p. 113). This type Durkheim only briefly describes, seeing it as a rare
phenomena in the real world. Examples include those with overregulated, unrewarding
lives such as slaves, childless married women, and young husbands. Durkheim never
specifies why this type is generally unimportant in his study.
Durkheim felt that his empirical study of suicide had discovered the structural forces that
caused anomie and egoism, and these forces were natural results of the decline of
mechanical solidarity and the slow rise of organic solidarity due to the division of labor
and industrialism. Also of importance was Durkheim's discovery that these forces
affected all social classes.
This is where the true sociological value of Suicide emerges. Because social forces that
affect human behavior are the result of previous human actions, it is the role of sociology
to expose and understand these actions as the foundations of societal structure. These
structural phenomena are at the root of human society, and through scientific, statistical
methods -- integrated with informed theory and educated conjecture -- the function of
these structures can be comprehended. In other words, Suicide is a vital work because it
is the first effective combination of sociological theory and empiricism to explain a social
phenomenon.