Emile Durkheim's Theory of Suicide

Here at the Sociology of Everything Podcast, we acknowledge the people of Ghana, Yarta, whose land this episode is mainly produced on and whose past and present elders we pay our respects to. Also, note to listeners, this episode talks extensively about the topic of suicide, and this is a topic you find distressing. Please consider contacting the Suicide Prevention Recovery Resources that are available wherever you're listening from. In Australia, this includes lifeline.org.au. Hello, I'm Eric Sue. And I'm Louis Everett. And we're Lou and the Suicide Prevention Agency, and this is a podcast about sociology brought to you by UniSA, the university that has at least one pool. The multiple pools. The multiple pools. Yeah, yeah. I regularly swim in the city-west pool. It's a lovely pool. Yeah, very nice. Except when you're swimming and there's someone swimming under the water going the wrong direction. Yeah, here we are. Like, there's the land. Under what? Across the land. Yeah, it's exciting. It's unbelievable. Anyway, sorry. Do I agree about that? In this episode, we are going to look at Dirkheim's famous text Suicide. And we've already recorded an episode about the rules of sociological method where where Dirkheim talks about social facts. So for this episode to make more sense, we highly recommend you go back and listen to our previous episode about the rules of sociological method. This is a really interesting reading, Louis. It's one of Dirkheim's most famous texts that he's ever written. When sometimes people think of sociology, they'll remember reading this particular work of Dirkheim's. And it's because it deals with a topic that, you know, truth be told is kind of unsavory, suicide. It's a difficult topic for some people to talk about. But Dirkheim didn't select it for any ill reason. He wasn't like, you know, Dirkheim's not just like really the suicide because he's like this goth kid, you know. He's listening to, I don't know, what's a goth band these days? I'm not sure. I've never got into the goth band. Marilyn Manson, it's not because he's listening to that, you know, something like that, right? It's because he thinks that this phenomenon is a great way to demonstrate the existence, what he calls social facts, right? So social facts just recap. They describe an external reality that exists in societies that have a cultural basis. So, you know, we talked in the previous episode about how social facts can be a whole range of things. They can be the institution of marriage. They can be the pressures we face in terms of our dress, in terms of our dreams of what we eat. But suicide can also be construed as a social fact. And this is quite, I think, an amazing observation to make, okay? Because when we think of suicide as Dirkheim, right? We almost always think of it in very individualized psychological terms. Because when someone does the act of suicide, it's like the act itself is shrouded in some type of mystery. You can't ask a person after the communist suicide why they've done it, right? If they were successful on doing it, there's a mystery. But Dirkheim says, you know, sociology can actually shed a new light on this phenomenon. And then we zoom out, right? When we zoom out, when we begin to look at suicide from a sociological point of view, we begin to uncover a new reality of how it works. And so, I don't know if you found this to be interesting, but I thought it was really fascinating of him trying to understand suicide, not just in terms of the individual, but looking at the social. And the way he does that is to look at the statistics around suicide. Yeah. Well, that completely underpins his entire argument that instead of analyzing the individual reasons that specific people have given prior to committing suicide or when attempting to commit suicide, which there was some data on, but Dirkheim's quite critical of how that data was collected and the unreliability of it. Dirkheim looked at the rates of suicide across societies and his key findings that underpinned his entire study was that there was a stability to the suicide rate in any specific social group. And that between different social groups, so if you just think countries, you know, in one country, there was a certain rate, but in another country, there was quite a different rate. So this whole study is about him trying to work out what is it about each society that influences the quiet, reliable, and the quiet, static suicide rate of that society. There has to be something that differs between social groups that influences the suicide rate. And so the whole study is trying to uncover what it is. And that's classic looking for social facts, looking for those objective things about society that we can use scientific methods to understand and connect. What is it about societies that influence the suicide rate? And Dirkheim's a path hypothesis in this particular work is that maybe our connection to the people around us, maybe the bond we have with the communities we belong to, something that's known as social solidarity, maybe this will affect suicide rates. Maybe if you have a deeper connection, this will shield you from the tendency to commit suicide. But conversely, if you live in us in a society or you're in a particular context where you feel more disconnected from others, then maybe there's a greater tendency then for you to commit suicide. And so what Dirkheim really does then to test this theory out, this hypothesis out, is to look at the suicide rates between two different religious groups that were in Europe at the time. I was looking at the suicide rates between Protestants and between Catholics. The first time I came across this text, it was a bit unclear about the distinction between Protestant Catholics. How would you describe that distinction, Louis? Well, I think we don't need to be theological experts. Here we can look at Dirkheim's writing and he really picks out two key variables between those two versions of Christianity. And one of those variables they have in common, Dirkheim points out that they both treat suicide in the same fashion. They both see it as a very bad thing as a seal. No, it is not allowed. But a key variable that differs between Catholicism and Protestantism, isn't it? Yes, it is. Very good. Is the level of connectedness that the people have when they practice the religion? So within Catholicism, the actual rituals that people undergo and the way they approach learning about the religion is very much done in a group dynamic. People spend a lot more time together as groups, they worship together and they really encourage to think the same way about their religious world. So it creates a really strong shared identity and shared way of thinking, shared way of understanding. It creates strong social cohesion amongst that group based on shared identity. Whereas Protestantism is more individual. It encourages people to think more individually about the Bible and about how they worship and live and it just allows much more individual free thought. And because of that, there's less shared identity and Dirkheim hypothesized that created a looser form of social cohesion. So it has locked in with one another. For Dirkheim, Catholics are associated with higher levels of social solidarity, Protestants, there's going to be lower levels. So then he was trying to understand, all right, does your membership in one of these groups and affect your tendency to commit the act of suicide? And his preliminary findings seem to suggest the answer is yes. That somehow being tied to others does have a measurable effect. So I can say at the time that Dirkheim did it, he found that suicide was more common in Protestant countries such as Prussia, Saxony, and Denmark than it was in Catholic countries including Spain, Portugal, and Italy. He also talks about how it's not even just our membership in certain groups. It could be our marital status. Right? If we are married or not, that can also have an effect on the suicide rate if we look at it from a broader point of view. Now, the next section of the tech is quite fascinating because Dirkheim isn't just interested in talking about suicide writ large. He's, this is quite a nuanced piece. He's trying to understand how people commit suicide for a variety of reasons, at least sociologically speaking, because he doesn't want to simply say that if we're more connected to the people around us, that this then protects us from the active suicide. There's something more nuanced going on. And so this causes dark time to distinguish between different types of suicide. He keeps, he actually puts forward four types. Okay. He talks about there being an egoistic form of suicide, an altruistic form of suicide, an nomic form of suicide, and a fatalistic form of suicide. Let's go through the shall we? Egoistic suicide. What is he trying to get at when he's putting forward that concept? The form of egoistic suicide is the one we've already been discussing a bit in terms of religious difference. And if we look a bit more at some of the other social structures that impact suicide. So he talks about families. Interesting marriage, he found not to be as big a variable, some of the other things, but families when people have families and the bigger the families are. That's another key social structure that embeds people into a group that creates a shared identity around being a member of a family. And he also looked at political societies as well. I looked at moments in political societies where there was say a war or some big disruption and all of a sudden everyone had that mentality of you know we're in this together. They're the shared identity that develops at those times of crisis. And he noticed that suicide rate dropped during those moments, during wars, during these other things. And so the common variable, the common factor across all these different things, religion, family and political disruption is that when someone is embedded into a certain social group and they have a shared understanding, a shared way of looking at the world with a group, they have all these connections. And even if their individual desires, even if what's going on in their personal life is bad and can potentially be a cause for suicide, this shared social cohesion, this shared identity of other people, that holds them up, that that stocks people committing suicide. And sorry. No, so so egoistic suicide, we are so I'm hearing you correctly. It results from when people are in social situations where individualism or a sense of disconnection occurs. So like if I exist in a society, everyone's out for themselves. And I'm not bound together with someone else. So whether there's not a sense of like shared affection. Then yeah, that kind of makes sense, right? So for you, people would be more likely to commit suicide. They don't feel like other people care about them. So for that kind of if you are a Protestant, a divorcee without kids, yeah, and not working unemployed, then all you have is your own personal ego, your own personal identity. You've got no shared group to kind of hold you together. And he thinks you're you're in real trouble in that situation. Yeah, conversely, there's another form of suicide though, that kind of that is like the flip side of that. Altruistic suicide and altruistic suicide according to Turkine results when members of society are too committed to one another there. There's too much of an obligation that we have. It's not a Goldilocks thing going on here. It is. Yeah. That middle porridge. And you know, and there's a lot of examples of altruistic suicide. Can you give any? Well, some of the ones that Dirk Iron points towards say is members of the army for instance, when you know, when you're trained to be a soldier, all those individual parts of your identity, what makes you a unique person, a sort of shrunken down and your thought to be part of a group, you need to follow orders about thinking about your personal safety, about thinking about yourself. Your identity becomes just the shared identity. It's outside of yourself. It's altruistic. And because of that, if there's an opportunity where let's say someone drops a grenade and someone needs to jump on it, you're supposed to jump on it without thinking. I'm not sure if I could ever really give up my personal sense of safety and identity to jump on a grenade for you. But maybe the only reason I could see myself doing it is I want I was like really committed to doing my Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. It's a bomb. Can you imagine me? It's a bomb. That's my last word. Like he did it. You know, he went out doing this army impression. But it's interesting. Within altruistic suicide, Dirk comes talks about obligatory altruistic suicide. And that's more the army thing where you're really obligated. It's part of your job as well. To risk your life for your comrades and not just for your comrades, but for the army in general and your country, you know, for King and Country. That is not just something that you're trained to do. It's actually your job. And the problem is you don't have enough individual, you don't have enough egoism on the side. You don't have enough care for your personal being to override your collective identity. But it can be optional as well, right? Doesn't have to be forced. That's right. But nevertheless, people still do it. It doesn't have to be forced. But the point again that Dirk kind seems to be making here, how tight you are with the others around you, very much helps to determine your likelihood of community suicide or not. The third form of suicide, I think it's actually very quite fast-dating. It's something that Dirk has been interested in. He was interested in throughout his entire his career. And this this form of suicide is known as anomic suicide. I think we have some idea of what it means to be egoistic, just in general, same with altruistic. But anomic is kind of one of those weird words. And it also it's the adjective form of the noun "anomi". When we experience anomi and we commit suicide, then that's anomic suicide. What does this one refer to? Just type of suicide. So this one refers to situations in which people find themselves because societies change rapidly around them or because there's being or just because that situation that finds themselves in, where there's not many laws and rules and norms surrounding the individual. All of a sudden, they're left purely to their own devices. They need to decide what's important, what's not important. They need to decide how to live their lives. And this can be very isolating. This can be you know, when you're in this situation, you don't really know what to do. You can you this is a sense of form of meaninglessness when you're in this situation. This is suicide, that results from normalness. I think Dirk, even in the specific he says, it says it results from activity being unregulated. Yeah. And I think it's important with these different types of suicide. Dirk kind doesn't just look at different countries. He's not just looking at country, averse country, B. He looks at smaller subpopulation. So obviously with, um, altruistic suicide, he looks at people, you were in the army, the people not in the army. And with anomic suicide, he looks at the different jobs people have. And you know, he looks at the fact that people who are in industrial and commercial occupations, where they can attain great wealth and where there's highly deregulated areas, there's less rules about what they should do and how they should live. They actually have a higher rates of suicide in his studies than people who live in professions where there's more rules. And, you know, I mean, I think Anomine really, you know, describes the experience of feeling lost. Yeah. And how many of us, especially in certain types of modern societies, feel like we're lost. Right. And this can be a, this can be social and origin. Yeah. Think about a lot of the students that are listening to this very episode, this podcast. A lot of them are probably wondering, what the heck am I going to do with my life? I sometimes even think about that. Louis, because there's no set rules. Yeah. How things should go for some things anyway, especially for your career. Careers can come and go in any moment. And this is why unemployed people oftentimes are more likely to commit suicide. Yeah. Because there's a greater sense of Anomine being lost. It makes me think of a really good four corners reporter. So not that long ago looking at sport stars when they finish their careers. And one day they have, you know, careers where they spend so much of their time in a certain club with certain people, everything they do from their nutrition to, to, you know, their whole daily schedule and everything is so tightly regulated and controlled. And then when they retire, suddenly that out on their own, there's all of that structure that was around them, who've been eviscerated. And they can find that so lonely and isolating and lose meaning. And they just find something else to do. Like a television presenter. That's right. And the last pharmaceutical side really quickly is a fatalistic pharmaceutical side. And that's just basically when you have no options inside your life is planned out to the T. And the only way to escape is to commit suicide. I think the thing you know about Dirkheim's work, there's a lot of increased systems of his work. Certainly we won't be able to go into him in this podcast. But there have been some extensions of his work also. Some people have tried to look at how Dirkheim's theory of suicide helps us to better understand the phenomenon of suicide bombings around the world. And some people have also tried to look at the ways in which suicide can also be a very gendered phenomenon. One of our colleagues at UniSA Katrina Joworski is very much interested in this topic. But we should now move on to the segment that we like to call say what? Looks at a quote which is a need of further explanation. And I want to bring one to our attention and it goes as follows. Dirkheim writes, "From all these facts we could conclude that the suicide social rate can only be explained sociologically. It is the moral constitution of the society which always determines the quota of voluntary deaths. For each population there is a collective force with a particular strength which impels men to kill themselves." Now if we set aside the very gendered language that Dirkheim uses, I think this statement is kind of a restatement of Dirkheim's key idea that he's trying to advance in this piece. It's a social fact. That's right. Suicide is a social fact. Something we regard as being deeply unknowable, more personal or psychological, can actually be illuminated when we begin, bring to bear sociological ways of seeing the world. And I think, hopefully, on a very difficult topic that can give us a bit of hope, right? Yeah. And I think that's such an important point because one of the amazing things about acknowledging it's a social fact and that something as important as a suicide rate can be influenced by the social setting in which people exist means that we can start to identify how to adjust that social setting. What changes can we make to the way people are embedded within their social groups to try and reduce suicide rates? That's right. Thanks very much as always, catch you in the next episode. Lume the Su is a sociology podcast hosted by Eric Su and Louis Everess. It's produced and edited by Eric Su, with special assistance from UniSA Online and UniSA Justice and Society. To learn more about studying sociology and other programs online or in person at the University of South Australia, visit UniSA.edu.au where you can search for more details. Lume the Su is primarily recorded on the lands of the Ghana people. The hosts of the podcast would like to pay their respects to elders past, present and emerging. If you like to get in touch or learn more about the podcast, visit our website at sociologypodcast.com. Thanks for listening.