Emile Durkheim's Theory Of Suicide

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.

Egoistic Suicide is when a person isolates themselves from the world and feel like they no longer belong.

Have you ever thought about killing yourself because of depression or because of the responsibilities you have? Suicide is when someone ends their own life. Usually people who commit suicide is because they can not take the pain of something, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Suicides can happen all ages, but according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, people around the ages of forty five to sixty four had the highest suicides in the year of 2015. Suicide is a problem because many people thinks that it would make other people’s life easier and that it is a way to run away from their own problems and pain. However, suicides can make other people around them think that suicide is the best way to solve problems and it can encourage them to commit suicide. The idea that suicide can end pain and that it is the easiest way to run away from hardships is a problem because it leads to more suicides. To prevent people from thinking that suicide is a good solution to any problem, they should quit social media, they should not overwhelm themselves with stress, and they have knowledge about suicide.

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

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

The existence of too much and too little integration and regulation results in different suicides such as egotistic and anomie. Egoistic suicide happens when individuals are integrated too little (such as elderlies), there is excessive individualism, which is low social integration. Individuals who do decide to commit egoistic suicide are just not strongly supported by their peers in a unified social group. On the other hand, anomie suicide is committed once the person’s sense of perseverance is lost and individuals not being connected to the society. The circumstance of uncertainty results from the breakdown of morals and values and from the lack of ambition and

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.

Introduction The primary source that will be discussed in this paper is Suicide written by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim was a French sociologist who was most famous in the 19th and 20th century for his work on the structure of society. During the time of his writings, he analyzed different social institutions and the roles in which they play in society. As a result, his work was associated with the theoretical framework of structural functionalism. The 19th century was most known for the Industrial Revolution.

Emile Durkheim was well –known sociologist famous for his views on the structures of society. During his theory development, He discovered four kinds of suicide committed by people in the society in which they are living in. Durkheim developed a theoretical typology of suicide to explain the differing effects of social factors and how they might lead to suicide. They are as follows:

Durkheim did not feel satisfied with individualized explanations for suicide such as alcoholism or depression. He felt there needed to be a stronger explanation and sought to explain how suicide was truly brought about through social forces. He constructed a coordinate system that contained social integration (how well you are connected with society) on the y-axis, and social regulation (what you expect daily from the world) on the x-axis. You need to maintain a position somewhere near the middle of the two to have a low risk for suicide. This graph led him to four different types of suicide. Egoistic suicide occurs when an individual is not very connected to society. Altruistic suicide is the opposite, where an individual is too integrated.

In this case the whole idea of industrial capitalism and accumulating a wealthy and prosperity is economic material. Truly, this means to be free of any limited rule or authority. It means to rip off society at any price to accumulate more profit. Because greediness is the main factor to accumulate wealthy. For this reason, the absent of government regulation will increase social disorder, and instability. Durkheim believed that functionality of law and order are very important to social life. That should maintain the development and stability of the modern society. He identified that suicide is social chaos and he is trying to find out the causes of suicide. Durkheim believed that suicide is only thing that violates modern social norms which social institutions are required to train individuals in a ways to stabilize their life (Suicide 128,129,130,131,132,133).

According to Durkheim’s theories, suicide is the result of disturbances in the balance of social integration and regulation for an individual. Social integration can be defined as one’s connection to a social group, and moreover as the purpose and meaning provided to an individual’s life through said group. Common sources of social integration include: religion, domestic groups, political groups, and ethnic groups. Often social integration can be associated with social regulation. Social regulation can be understood as the social and moral rules that regulate what is right or wrong; and good or bad. Durkheim uses these terms to understand suicide as a social fact, or a result of a force that is beyond the individual. He sees social integration

When it comes to suicide often as individuals we describe suicide as something that is caused by an individuals experience that may include how someone lives, personalities, and religion. While also including that there are no biological influence that may be passed on from genetics, genes, and heredity. However, Durkheim argues against suicide being caused by social factors and how involved or integrated the individuals is in connection to society. Usually when asked why someone decided to kill himself or herself we usually think of what he/she was thinking about in their mind. Almost pertaining to the individuals decision we wouldn’t be thinking about society as something that could have caused suicide but instead we would shift our focus on the individual. However, it seems as if the individuals decision is not the sole focus of suicide. Though the acts are committed by a single person there are various reasons someone would commit this act.

The term collective consciousness refers to the collection of beliefs, morals and ideas which come to be known as social facts and how any given individual comes to view themselves as a part of any given group (Piepmeyer; 2007). While collective consciousness can be attributed as a factor which can cause both egoist and altruist suicides, in modern republics the theory is often applied to social groups with the single determination to reduce the number of fatalities caused by

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