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Transcript
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: 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: 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: 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. 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: 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.