Emile Durkheim's Theory Of Suicide

Durkheim’s “suicide” in the zombie apocalypse, by Anna s. Mueller, Seth Abrutyn, and Melissa Osborne talked about how Durkheim's work on suicide ties into the world today. They started off the article with a walking dead analogy showing how a natural disasters such as a zombie apocalypse can tear the world apart. One of the key arguments found in the essay are is integration or regulation more important for keeping a society together? Durkheim would say that while social integration structures give you love, social connections and inclusion in a group, you also need regulation for rules, order and guidance. The article states that slowly over time isolation leads to suicide. Ultimately Durkheim would argue that without support of other people

Both Suicide and Modernity and The Cultural Logic of Collective Representations by Emile Durkheim have a focus around people and their relationship with religion and their way of thinking about the world around them. In Suicide and Modernity, Durkheim talks about people and their goals and how goals and desires effect them, while The Cultural Logic of Collective Representations talks about where different ideas and desires originate from. Durkheim starts off Suicide and Modernity by talking about humans and the fact that no one can be happy without having their desires match what their real means are. If a person’s desires are greater than what they are actually able to have and achieve, no one is going to be happy. Humans are different from

The importance of social factors over the individual can also be seen in Durkheim’s work on suicide (Stones, 2008). Suicide was explained in terms of two independent variables, integration in society and regulation by society. Low levels of integration led to egoistic suicide, while low levels of regulation led to anomic suicide. Durkheim cited egoism and anomie as the main causes of suicide in the modern world; a world which he believed showed less interaction and people thinking more about themselves than others. As a result, people are less bound to one another, there is less community and social control is weaker (Stones, 2008). Durkheim applied his

Feelings of isolation have been linked to higher suicide rates. Durkheim’s study on suicide during the industrial revolution supports this theory as he states that, “people were increasingly disconnected from their communities and that this social upheaval had a greater effect on suicide rates than other factors like wealth” (Winner & Collishaw, 2011). Interestingly enough, despite the increase of media attention on suicide, no studies have been published that explain why suicide rates vary among different groups. However, various factors are involved in the decision to commit suicide. As a result, suicide rates vary according to race, gender and age.

The interpretivist approach directly contrasts the positivist one and seeks to focus on the meanings of suicide for those involved. Douglas criticises Durkheim's use of official statistics as they are not accurate and recommends qualitative studies to discover the real rate of suicide. The statistics are a result of a coroners label and thus it is not trustworthy in his view. This suggested that cases are decided on "the basis of probability”. Douglas further seeks to find out the meaning of the 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).

4. According to G. H. Mead, children learn to take the role of the other as they model themselves on important people in their lives, such as parents. Mead referred to these people as:

For many the concept of teenage suicide is almost always correlated with the psychological mindset of the individuals. However, there is a lot of the factors behind these horrifying events that actually are more sociologically related. These catastrophic events are directly correlated with interactions with the world. The loss of teenagers across the world is increasing and it is a subject that should be touched on in both sciences. Throughout this paper the study of teen suicide in the sociological view will be discussed by going through Emile Durkheim’s studies and the sub groups in which it can occur. These events are related back to such things as social rejection, religious beliefs and social situations. This paper will also touch on the different types of suicide and what the suicides correlate with. The main purpose of this paper is to show how teen suicide is not only a psychological problem with students but to breakdown the areas in which cause these feelings.

Using material from Item A and elsewhere, assess different sociological explanations of suicide. (21 marks)

Durkheim’s theory consisted of finding a problem which was suicide. He then came up with a dependent variable which was the suicide rate. The social forces became the independent variable. The hypothesis would be what the suicide rate would vary with. When he collected his date Durkheim would go into detail about each individuals life and any uprising problems that he could find. He would then analyze the data into four categories which are the three most common types of suicide (egoistic suicide, altruistic suicide and anomic suicide). After looking at the date and matching it up with the proper suicide type Durkheim would then draw conclusions or form a theory.

The Suicide theory proposed by Emile Durkheim (1951), explains that because of the numerous adverse socioeconomic factors that operate in the life of the young Black male, many give into the negative socio-genic force of illicit drug culture as either a psychological or physiological escape from their reality. The development of deeper feelings of low self-worth which can cause a vicious cycle of self-defeating behavior which will cause suicidal behavior.

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.

In his study he found that certain social groups where more likely to commit suicide than others; for example, Protestants were more likely to commit suicide than Catholics; as ‘the Catholic Religion integrated its members more strongly into a religious community’ (Haralambos and Horlborn, 2000: 975). Durkheim based this upon the

statistics displayed that some categories of people were more prone to take their own lives,

Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a purely individual decision but French sociologist Emile Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed in the influence of society on the individual and that if anything can explain that relation, it is suicide. His use of the data of suicide, not specific cases and reports, to study the societal trends reveals his true subject of study: society as a whole and its role in the individual experience. Durkheim uses the study of suicide via the quantitative methodological approach as a tool to study society as a broader whole.