Emile Durkheim On Suicide Summary

According to Emile Durkheim there are four different types of suicide. They are egoistic suicide, altruistic suicide, anomic suicide, and fatalistic suicide. Although I personally have never thought about committing suicide, my life has changed because of two girls who decided to take their own lives. I grew up in the small town of Philomath, Oregon so everybody knows everybody. In October of 2013 a freshman named Lilly Stagner committed suicide. We weren’t personally friends, but I saw her in the halls each day and she seemed like a happy girl. On the morning of October 23 everyone came to school, but something just didn’t seem normal. In first period our teacher read us a letter about how Lilly had passed away and that there were counseling

"Suicide, what a terrible concept. There are two types of suicide: physical, and theoretical. Physical suicide is the more commonly heard type of suicide. It entails the person actually, physically killing himself or herself. On the other hand, theoretical suicide is when the person does something that will, in turn, get him or her killed. For example, in “All About Suicide” by Luisa Valenzuela, Ismael, a man that works at a minister’s office, murders the minister, a high-ranking public official. Ismael has been forced to be quiet by the government; therefore he lashes out by killing the minister so that he can reveal the truth about the government. In doing this, Ismael technically “kills himself” because he knows the government

Durkheim proceeded to distinguish suicide into four different groups that related to the individual’s integration into society and in turn the social regulation of society over its members. ‘Consequently, we shall be able to determine the social types of suicide by classifying them not directly by their preliminarily described characteristics, but by the causes which produce them…. We will first seek the social conditions responsible for them; then group these conditions in a number of separate classes by their resemblances and differences, and we shall be sure that a specific type of suicide will correspond to each of these classes.’ (Durkheim, 1897) The four suicide groups were identified as Egotistic, Anomic, Altruistic and Fatalistic.

Egoistic suicide which is when individuals are not integrated well enough into society for example people who live alone compared to those who live with family. Secondly Altruistic suicide which is when individuals are felt to be too integrated into society causing suicide, for example members of the armed forces were said to have greater suicide rates than civilian personnel as they were too strongly integrated into a united body. Durkheim also put forward the idea of Anomic suicide, this is when the norms and values in society become unclear or confused in times of great social change and an individual is not taught to adapt to changes well enough. For example an unexpected death of a family member is sudden social change which can cause Anomic suicide. Lastly, he suggested Fatalistic suicide. Fatalism is the excessive amount of regulation which leads to one committing suicide.

Throughout this essay, we will be looking a Durkheim’s analysis of suicide and whether his ideas on suicide were right in his time, and whether they are still relevant in today’s society. Emile Durkheim described ‘suicide’ as a term “applied to any death which is the direct or indirect result of a positive or negative act accomplished by the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result” (Durkheim, Suicide: a Study in Sociology, originally published 1897, 1970). Positive acts were acts that were undertaking with the intention to produce death. Negative acts were actually the distinct lack of survival acts undertaken, with the knowledge that without these acts, death would be the result. As far as Durkheim was concerned, although suicide itself is a very individual act, the reasoning behind suicide was due to predominantly social factors (Durkheim 1970, p44). Suicide was sociological, not psychological. His research was based not on the personality traits of those who had committed suicide, but instead at the suicide rates of different countries compared to the social factors that link the countries together (Durkheim 1970, p40).

These are the details of the three most common suicides. Egoistic suicide is committed by people who are weak and supported by membership in a cohesive social group. They start to depend a huge amount on themselves than on group goals and rules of conduct to sustain them in their lives. When stressful times are around they feel isolated and helpless. Altruistic suicide is committed by people who are extremely committed to group norms and objectives and who notice their own lives as insignificant. These suicides involved dying for some type of cause. Anomic

Suicide is the demonstration of deliberately consummation one's own particular life. The way societies view suicide differs generally as indicated by culture and religion. For instance, numerous Western societies, and in addition standard Judaism, Islam, and Christianity tend to view killing oneself as entirely negative (Edwards-Dryden, 2016). One myth about suicide that might be the consequence of this perspective is thinking about suicide (self-destructive ideation) to dependably be the aftereffect of a dysfunctional behavior. A few societies additionally regard a suicide endeavor as though it were a crime. Be that as it may, suicides are once in a while seen as justifiable or even good in specific circumstances, such as, in protest in persecution (for example, a hunger strike), as part of battle or resistance (for

Durkheim’s theories and work on suicide classified the phenomenon into four types; Egoistic, Altruistic, Anomic and Fatalistic (Ritzer Pg 200-202). Durkheim’s concept of social integration ties into egoistic suicide as it

Durkheim was focused on setting the social level apart where independence is kept. He recognized that people in a society have different susceptibility to suicide and the influences that make them to

Altruistic suicide occurs when there are dramatic social forces. An example would be a plane crash, the people who commit suicide feel that they are doing it for the better of their organization or themselves. A few real-life examples of this would be 9/11, the Pulse night club shooting, and the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. Egoistic suicide occurs when a person feels detached from society. Many elderly people who live in nursing homes feel detached from society. They went from cooking, cleaning, and going to work every day to not having a say in what they do or when they see their family. For some people this is too much and they become suicidal. Fatalistic suicide occurs when people feel that they have no control over their world. An example would be when Trump was elected president, for some people this would have been too much to handle and it would have put them over the edge. Another example could be a prisoner, if someone is on death row and they have sat there for twenty plus years, sometimes they would rather die than sit there another day.

Durkheim does not see egoism, altruism, anomie and fatalism as types of suicide, but types of social structure that highlight the presence or lack of integration and regulation. It must be stressed that this excess/lack of integration and regulation are not seen as direct causes of suicide, rather Durkheim sees a number of voluntary deaths in society as inevitable; integration and regulation are merely prophylactic to suicidal impulses, which when taken to excess or dramatically reduced, fail to act as a preventative, and so suicides occur. This clarification is an important strength of Durkheim’s theory: it allows the biography of the individuals who kill themselves to vary, while still explaining underlying pressures/lack of to explain their deaths, and the varying suicide rates between groups.

The first sociologist to research into suicide was Ėmile Durkheim; he “wished to show that sociological factors were ‘capable of explaining much about such anti-social phenomena’” (Gingrich). Durkheim’s research allowed for him to understand how society connected to the rates of suicide and, more detailed, the importance of social integration on the rates of suicide across the country. He found a correlation between the rates of suicide and the seasons because the amount of social interactions increased as the seasons became longer and people were more likely to interact with the more accommodating temperatures (Gingrich). His views on suicide can all relate back to the degree to which society plays a role in one’s life due to the amount of interactions one has with society and the regulations that society imposes on the individual (Gingrich). Along with this view Durkheim also created four different reasons for committing suicide. The first type of suicide is egoistic suicide is when social integration in very limited, and people have the feeling of being normless. Next is altruistic suicide where societal pressures were too great and where suicide is forced upon a person, like the ritual suicides found in Japan that will be discussed later in this text. Anomic suicide is when there is a change in society, and the norms and

Emile Durkheim is a prominent figure in Sociology, and is often referred to as one of the founding fathers of the subject, alongside Marx and Weber. This is due to his work on studying Suicide in his book ‘Suicide: A Study in Sociology’, this work was monumental in the field of Sociology as Durkheim was the first sociologist to suggest that society can affect what is probably the most private action a person can perform; ending their life.

While discovering theories and research by sociologist Emile Durkheim, I was able to see a clear connection to how these theories could be applied to the amount of suicides to those of first nation decent. Considering citizens from first nations groups have been estimated to be eleven times more likely to commit suicide, there are underlying factors of why this may be. Durkheim’s theory states that suicide is a sociological issue and as we have seen there are many ways society could affect ones emotional state.

Suicide, to Durkheim, is “an exaggerated form of ordinary practices,” and they arise from “comparable states of mind” in people, with the only difference between daily and suicidal behavior being the “chance of death” (Durkheim 20-21). Durkheim spends the majority of the work dissecting the “apparent motives” for suicide (Durkheim 151) and observing the varieties of suicide, a feat made difficult by the inaccurate reporting and misunderstandings of investigators. Thus, to understand the types of suicide, we must “reverse the order of our research” for “There can only be as many different types of suicide as there are differences in the causes from which they derive,” (Durkheim 149). He says “if they were all found to have the same essential characteristics, they would be grouped in one class” but “observations that we would need to have are more or less impossible obtain” (Durkheim