suicide

suicide Commonly defined as the intentional killing of oneself. Émile Durkheim, in his classic study Suicide (1897), defined it as ‘every case of death which results directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act, accomplished by the victim himself which he knows must produce this result’. Controversially he did not require that the death must be intentional, arguing that intentions are hard to identify. Consequently he extended the definition, including for example heroic military deaths, where there is no chance of survival but no specific intention to kill oneself.

Durkheim chose to study suicide because it seemed to illustrate perfectly the necessity for and value of sociological explanation: a patently private, individual act, which was, none the less, subject to social forces and required a distinctively sociological explanation. He maintained that the tendency to suicide depended not on individual psychology or features of the physical environment, but on the nature of the individual's relation to society. Suicide as an individual action represented the failure of social solidarity and was indicative of the ineffectiveness of social bonds. He distinguished three main types of suicide according to causation. Altruistic and egoistic suicide depend on the individual's relations to social ideals and purposes. In altruistic suicide the individual is too strongly integrated into society—a society which encourages or even requires the individual to sacrifice his or her own life (as when a wife is expected to commit suicide on her husband's death). Conversely, in egoistic suicide the individual is insufficiently integrated into society, and so is not subject to the collective forces that prevent suicide—and, indeed, experiences an isolation and detachment conducive to it. Finally, anomic suicide depends on the social regulation of the individual's desires and ambitions. Where anomie—normlessness—is heightened in society, the individual's passions, ambitions, and appetites are increased to a level where they cannot find satisfaction.

Durkheim's analysis has been criticized on numerous grounds: for his definition of suicide and the mismatch between this definition and that embodied in the suicide statistics he employs to substantiate his argument; for his classification of types of suicide in terms of cause (so-called aetiological classification) which incorporates into the classification the very causal links he is seeking to establish; for his extreme polarization of social and psychological explanations (where complementarity should be assumed); and for using aggregate data to make inferences about individuals (the so-called ecological fallacy).

A major strand of subsequent sociological discussions concerns the limitations of official statistics of suicide. Jack D. Douglas, influenced by the work of interactionists and ethnomethodologists, argued in Social Meanings of Suicide (1967) that what was defined or treated as suicide differed from culture to culture, thereby calling into question cross-cultural and historical comparisons of suicide rates, or even data on suicide generated by different coroners. However, it does not follow that suicide statistics have no value in analysing the social causes of suicide; rather, that they need to be treated with exceptional care. One must assess the impact of social and cultural factors on the construction of suicide statistics as well as the tendency to commit suicide. Significantly, the tradition developed by Durkheim has continued, and a range of studies have provided some empirical support for his ideas and evidence of the impact of social factors (such as unemployment) on levels of suicide.

One important development has been the attention to attempted or parasuicide, frequently claimed to be a very different phenomenon from successful suicide, and representing a cry for help. However, some authors argue that the distinction between attempted and successful suicide is a matter of contingency, and it is wrong to exclude unsuccessful cases from the analysis.

The theoretical basis and empirical adequacy of Durkheim's explanation is most fully explored in Whitney Pope's Durkheim's Suicide (1976).