Suicide
(much of these notes owe their basic structure to Bearman's
paper on the network structure of Suicide: Bearman,
Peter S. “The
Social Structure of Suicide” Sociological
Forum, 1991. Page numbers from the
Free Press edition are in (), from the Calhoun et. Al. text in []. ).
Durkheim Starts SUICIDE by pointing out that suicide is, within a general
range, a fairly stable fact of societies. If you plot the suicide rate (that
is, the number of suicide per 100,000 inhabitants) of any society over time
shows a remarkable stability of the number of people committing suicide each
year. In fact, the suicide number is more stable (that is, has
fewer fluctuations over time) than the mortality rate (see figure.) However, in
all societies, as well as in the
How are we to make sense of this stability of the suicide rate within any
given society or subgroup? While suicide is an individual act, Durkheim argues
that the suicide RATE is a social fact - something that is external to any
individual. It is a product of the social structure of any given
society. Durkheim figured that by examining the different types of
suicide, he could identify key elements of social organization.
The two key dimensions for understanding suicide are the extent of social INTEGRATION and REGULATION.
Integration is the extent of social relations binding a person or a
group to others, such that they are exposed to the moral demands of the group
Regulation is defined as the normative or moral demands placed on the
individual that come with membership in a group.
(Bearman, 1992, p.503).
These two dimensions, as we will see, underlie EDs
development of EGOISTIC, ALTRUISTIC, ANOMIC and FATALISTIC types of suicide.
The argument:
The differences in the suicide rate between religious communities cannot be
attributed to dogmatic differences: suicide is a sin in Protestant denominations
as well as among Catholics and Jews. However, there are differences in terms of
embeddedness in religious communities. The movement
away from Catholicism is one away from a tight hierarchy, from faith, and from
rituals which continually reconfirm the embeddedness
in the community. In contrast, the practice of Protestantism does not insist
strongly on membership in the community, with the exception of Anglicans, who
are more similar to Catholics in terms of rituals and embeddedness
and, accordingly, have a similar suicide rate. Jews, on the other hand, have a
rich ritual life within a tightly knit community and a pronounced hierarchy,
which contributes to a low suicide rate among them. While minorities
might be better protected from suicide by virtue of closer social relations
forced by the potentially hostile majority--the pattern of lower suicide rates
among Catholics holds, however, even where they are in the majority.
He thus finds three facts:
Jews < Catholics < Protestants
Married < Unmarried
Rural < Urban
Wartime < Peacetime
1848 < other times
From these data, Durkheim identified the first type of suicide, namely
"Egoistic" suicide, that occurs among people who are not deeply
embedded (i.e. integrated) in communities. Importantly, in combining the
view of the Division of Labor w. the argument of Suicide, these are modern
people, people in a market economy. We can represent these people as
having loose ties to others.
Societies with a developed division of labor and a high degree of functional
integration are characterized by organic solidarity. Functional interdependence
between people is motivated by economic exchange, however, which does not
necessarily yield embeddedness in social
relations. In the extreme, people are so heterogeneous that they are not
members of any group.
Altruistic Suicide
Here ED discusses a different type of Suicide. Namely that found among "primitive" people. He says that:
"Suicide,..., is surely very common among primitive peoples. But it displays peculiar characteristics. All the facts reported above fall into one of the following three categories:
· Suicides of men on the threshold of old age or stricken w. sickness
· Suicides of women on their husband's death
· Suicides of followers or servants on the death of their chief
Now, when a person kills himself, in all these cases, it is not because he assumes the right to do so but, on the contrary, because it is his duty." (p.219)"We thus confront a type of suicide differing by incisive qualities from the preceding one. Whereas the latter [egoistic] is due to excessive individuation, the former is caused by too rudimentary individuation." (p.221)
We see this pattern as well among military members (p.228-239)
The historical transition identified in the Division of Labor moves from
high integration and regulation (altruistic suicide) to low integration and
regulation (egoistic suicide) Although social interactions increase over time
in the transition toward modernity, the social structure does not "envelop"
people any more, they interact with many different persons and groups but are
not integrated into any one world. Accordingly, people are not regulated
sufficiently, disattachment, emptiness, and highly
separated individuals are the consequence. Hence the linear increase in the
suicide rate, which is really an increase in egoistic suicide. Egoistic here
does not mean "following one's own interest"--rather, it means an
orientation away from others in terms of meaningful social relations to others.
In contrast, altruistic suicide occurs when the self is too full of society.
The self loses significance by virtue of the deep embeddedness
in the group. Examples for this form of suicide are the Buddhist monks who
burned themselves to protest against the Vietnam war; terrorists who blow
themselves up together with their target. Cults try to create altruistic
societies by stripping away ties their members may have to society at large, to
kin and friends. The military, too, aims at eliminating every external expression
of individuality with uniforms and such; social relations outside the unit are
discouraged, and the self is completely re-oriented toward the unit and away
from kin, friends, and civil society.
Anomic Suicide (Chapter 5)
Sometimes, the two dimensions of social relations are ripped apart. By taking
into account these abnormal situations, Durkheim was able to account for some
bizarre empirical findings in regard to the suicide rate. He found that during
economic down-swings, counter intuitively, the suicide rate decreases. The
imagery of the Great Depression with lots and lots of people who throw
themselves out of the windows of their offices is empirically irrelevant. When
people lose life chances and possessions, social relations seem to fill up these
gaps, and the suicide rate goes down. In contrast, the suicide rate increases
during economic booms. When everything seems possible, people drown in a sea of
normlessness. Durkheim termed this condition
"anomie" (normlessness.)
ED says,
"So far is the increase in poverty from causing the
increase in suicide that even fortunate crises, the effect of which is abruptly
to enhance a country's prosperity, affect suicide like economic
disasters." (p.243)
"If therefore industrial or financial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is, disturbances of the collective order. Every disturbance of equilibrium, even though it achieves greater comfort and a heightening of general vitality, is an impulse to voluntary death." (p.246)
How is this possible?
To get the answer, he develops the concept of anomie.
"It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss. But if nothing can restrain this capacity, it can only be a source of torment to itself." (p.247) We need a regulatory force, which must come from an authority (p.248) [p.194]. Importantly,
"when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence; thence come the sudden rises in the curve of suicides we have pointed out." (p.252) [p.197]
"The state of de-regulation or anomie is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining" (p.253) [p.198]
Importantly, this state of anomie is not just due to economic shifts, but cultural and structural positions, thus we see a difference in suicide by position in the economic structure.
"Anomie, therefore, is a regular and specific factor in suicide in our modern societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent feeds. So we have here a new type to distinguish from the others. It differs from them in its dependence, not on the way in which individuals are attached to society, but on how it regulates them. Egoistic suicide results from man's no longer finding a basis for existence in life; altruistic suicide, because this basis for existence appears to man situated beyond life itself. The third sort of suicide, the existence of which has just been shown, results from man's activity's lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings. By virtue of its origin we shall assign this last variety the name of anomic suicide" ([p.201]
Note that he relates this closely to egoistic. We will show that it's really a combination that sits on the off diagonal of the intersection of integration and regulation.
Anomie is closely related to the psychological concept of dissonance: where persons are closely tied to two different groups which do not overlap, tensions between two normative worlds are likely to occur. Teenagers, for example, struggle to reconcile the different normative demands of their peer group and their family of origin and thus may occupy an anomic social position. Another classical example are the newly rich. Lottery winners are notoriously unhappy and caught in the tensions between their old world and the new social relations brought about by the sudden fortune.
The structural representation shows the tight integration into two different
groups with conflicting normative demands. As people get to have relations to
more than one or two groups, normative demands of any one group diminish and
the self can develop in a coherent manner.
There is a fourth type, that Durkheim only briefly mentions in a footnote, that is logically implied by this intersection:
"The above considerations show that there is a type of suicide the opposite of anomic suicide.... It is the suicide deriving from excessive regulation, that of persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by excessive discipline. It is the suicide of very young husbands, of the married woman who is childless, .. of slaves ... To bring out the ineluctable and inflexible nature of a rule against which there is no appeal, and in contrast with the expression "anomie" which has been used, we might call it fatalistic suicide."
The reverse situation, namely excessive regulation without integration,
leads to fatalistic suicide The slave is integrated only via the tie to his or
her master, the future is fundamentally blocked by excessive regulation.
Durkheim's examples were childless married women in his world who lack an
independent integration into the world via their role as mothers, while the tie
to the husband gets increasingly fictive. The husband is free to develop social
relations in the social world and thus will be increasingly removed from his
wife while she continues to be governed by the norms for conduct and behavior
as a married woman.