Suicide (book)

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Suicide was one of the groundbreaking books in the field of sociology. Written by 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.

Most contemporary studies of suicide focused on individual characteristics. Durkheim studied connections between individuals and society. 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 disorganized 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.

Durkheim found out that:

Suicide rates are higher for 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.

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 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. This is basically the same point as for why people who are married and/or have children commit less 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 extremeties in thoese factors occurs.

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, ending his or her own life will have little impact on the rest of the society. In other words, there are few social ties to keep the individual from taking his or her own life.
Altruistic suicide: Altruism is a state is opposite to egoism, in which the individual is extremely attached to the society and thus has no life of his or her 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, he or she will commit suicide regardless of his or her own hesitation if the society's norms ask for the person's death.
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.
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.

References

Durkheim, Suicide, (1897), The Free Press reprint 1997, ISBN 0684836327

External links

[Analysis of the book]

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