Durkheim’s Study

Durkheim chose to study suicide for a number of reasons. In late 19th Century France the new behavioural science of Sociology was gradually becoming established as an academic discipline. Durkheim wanted to reinforce this process and demonstrate how his particular approach to the subject was superior to others. He wished to use his study to show how there was a sociological level of analysis which was distinct from other disciplines and which made an important contribution to the explanation of social phenomena.

In particular, Durkheim attempted to show that suicide could not be fully explained by psychologists and that Sociology could explain aspects of suicide which Psychology could not. Durkheim did not deny that particular circumstances could lead to a particular person taking their own life but he believed that personal reasons could not account for the suicide rate. He tried to show that there was no relationship between the incidence of insanity (which many psychologists associated with suicide) and the suicide rate. Eg: he found that Jews had higher rates of insanity than other religious groups, but they had lower rates of suicide.

Durkheim also chose to study suicide because of the availability of suicide statistics from a number of European countries. He regarded these statistics as social facts and believed that they could be used to find the sociological causes of suicide rates. He hoped to uncover the patterns at work in the production of suicide rates. In this way he aimed to demonstrate that Sociology was as rigorous a discipline as the natural sciences.

Durkheim first tried to show that suicide rates were relatively stable in a particular society over a period of time. From death certificates and other official documents, he was able to show that, over the periods covered, there was indeed a remarkable consistency in the comparative suicide rates of the European societies in question. Durkheim felt able to claim: “The suicide rate is therefore a factual order, unified and definite, as is shown by both its permanence and its variability.” He also found consistent variations in the suicide rate between different groups within the same society. He believed it was impossible to explain these patterns if suicide was seen solely as a personal and individual act.

Durkheim then went on to establish correlations between suicides and other sets of social facts. Having

Rate of suicides per million inhabitants in different European countries

established these correlations, Durkheim used multivariate analysis to isolate the most important variables and to determine whether there was a genuine relationship between these factors and suicide. The most common factors he found were:-

• Religion: Protestants were more likely to commit suicide than Catholics. The suicide rate was much higher in Protestant than Catholic countries. Similar differences could also be found between Protestant and Catholic areas within the same country. Jews had a low suicide rate, lower even than Roman Catholics.
  Durkheim recognized the possibility that it might be national culture rather than the main religion of particular countries that accounted for their suicide rate. In order to test whether this was the case, he checked on differences within the population of particular countries to see whether these differences supported his views on the importance of religion. The evidence supported Durkheim. Eg: Bavaria, the area of Germany with the highest number of Roman Catholics, also had the lowest suicide rate. Durkheim also checked the relative importance of different factors: he found that high suicide rates were correlated with high levels of education. However, he established that religion was more important than level of education. Jews had a low suicide rate despite having high level of education.
   
• Family relationships: those who were married were less likely to commit suicide than those who were single, widowed or divorced. Whether people had children or not was also very important. Indeed, the suicide rate for married women was lower than that for single women only if they had children Married

women who remained childless for a number of years had a high suicide rate.

• War and peace: the suicide rate dropped in time of war. After war broke out in 1866 between Austria and Italy, the suicide rate fell by 14% in both countries. This effect was felt not only in victorious but also in defeated countries. Thus, Germany defeated France in the war of 1870 but the suicide rate fell in both countries.

• Economic crisis: suicide rates rose at times of economic crisis. It might be expected that a recession that caused bankruptcies and unemployment and that increasing poverty would send up the suicide rate. Suicide rates also rose, however, when economies boomed. It was not worsening economic conditions but sudden changes in them that caused suicide rates to rise.

Durkheim’s Categorisation of Societies

To explain these patterns, Durkheim turned to his concept of the collective conscience (1893) - the core shared values of a social grouping - and social cohesion. He argued that people are naturally selfish and will not concern themselves with the problems of others unless society obliges them to. Society, he argued, does this by making people aware of their social bonds to others. Thus, the greater the level of social integration, the more harmonious the society. Durkheim argued that society achieves this form of social control through the common values taught through the family (primary socialisation). He also perceived that religion had a major role in reinforcing such common values.

Durkheim argued that those who feel most integrated into society are those with close family ties. Those without such relationships are those least bonded to society. Though he wouldn’t have known about the concept, Durkheim was unwittingly pinpointing the importance of the PURPLE vMEME and its need to find belonging. Without belonging, safety is easily compromised.

Religions, Durkheim noted, differ to what degree they emphasise social responsibility and interaction. Protestant versions of Christianity tend to emphasise more the importance of individual fulfilment - thus feeding RED and, in some people, ORANGE - while Roman Catholicism places greater emphasis on the group and relegates the importance of the individual.

Religions like Hinduism also consider the search for personal happiness relatively unimportant when set against the interests of the group.

Durkheim hypothesised that people who are less socially integrated - eg: Protestant, poor family/social networks - were more likely to commit suicide.

Durkheim concluded that suicide was related to which of 4 types of society people lived in:-

Egoistic

In Egoistic societies, individual rights, interests and welfare are heavily stressed and allegiance to the wider group is weak. People are encouraged to look after themselves and those particularly close to them - often at the expense of wider society. As a result, social bonds are weak and there is a low level of social integration.

Egoistic societies are closely related to Protestantism, with people encouraged to make their own decisions and to be responsible for the consequences. Durkheim noted that the Catholic religion integrated its members more strongly into a religious community, The long-established beliefs and traditional rituals of the Catholic Church provided a uniform system of religious belief and practice into which the lives of its members were closely intertwined. The Catholic faith was rarely questioned and the church had strong controls over the conscience and behaviour of its members. The result was a homogeneous community, unified and integrated by uniform belief and standardised ritual. By comparison, the Protestant Church encouraged its members to develop their own interpretation of religion, placed less emphasis on collective rituals and emphasized the individual's direct relationship with God. Protestantism advocated 'free inquiry' rather than the imposition of traditional religious dogma. To Durkheim: “The Protestant is far more the author of his faith.” As a result, Protestants were less likely to belong to a community that was unified by a commitment to common religious beliefs and practices. Durkheim concluded that the higher rate of suicide associated with Protestantism “results from its being a less strongly integrated church than the Catholic church”.

Culturally, individual failure or unhappiness are viewed as more understandable grounds for people to take their own lives. This egoistic suicide is more common in contemporary northern European and North American societies with their cultural emphasis on the ‘express self’ side of the Spiral. It is worth noting here that the RED vMEME is desperate to avoid shame. If there is no way to avoid overwhelming shame and the underpinning PURPLE is weak and/or frustrated by little or no sense of belonging, then suicide may indeed be an option.

However, within the societies discussed, there are still social institutions and forms of religion - eg: Catholicism - which counteract the prevalent egoistic values and encourage both a wider sense of belonging and responsibility to the wider community. Durkheim also emphasised that war and other forms of threat tend to pull people in such societies more together.

Within such societies, people who are more socially integrated, through church or family, were less likely to commit suicide. Eg: married people were less likely to commit suicide than single people.

Altruistic

In Altruistic societies, the welfare of individuals is viewed as far less important than the group. Individual choice or happiness is simply not a high priority. Therefore, Durkheim, argued, there is simply not enough motivation for individuals to commit suicide - except on behalf of the group. Individuals are so strongly integrated into their society that they would make the ultimate sacrifice for the benefit of others. This altruistic suicide occurs when the individual is expected to commit suicide on behalf of the wider society He used the term ‘altruistic’ to convey the idea that the individual self is totally sub-ordinated to others.

Durkheim saw this form of suicide as characteristic of ‘primitive’ societies and cited Hindu widows killing themselves at their husband's funeral (a practice known as ‘suttee’) - as well as in traditional Ashanti society some of the king's followers being expected to commit suicide after the death of the monarch. These examples demonstrate the effect of PURPLE’s unquestioning adherence to traditions and rituals.

Durkheim also saw it was also found amongst the military where it still existed as a kind of relic from earlier times. A notable example of military altruistic suicide occurred during the later stages of World War II when Japanese ‘kamikaze’ pilots were encouraged to die for the honour of their ‘god-emperor’ by crashing their planes into Allied warships. This is perhaps also an example of BLUE doing its duty. A contemporary example of altruistic suicide is the suicide bomber, prepared to sacrifice themselves for their political or religious cause. (See also the Blog: ‘Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber’)

Anomic

Societies develop cultural and social mechanisms to provide a framework for what are and aren’t acceptable actions - ie: the regulation of behaviour, whether by the more informal methods of social control favoured by PURPLE or the legalistic, formal systems used by BLUE.  Durkheim postulated that people revert to their natural selfishness or are simply bewildered and become uncertain as to how they should behave if these restraints are weakened and break down - a social condition Durkheim termed anomie.

Social restraints on behaviour are most likely to weaken during periods of significant social change - eg: during an economic or political crisis. Thus, Durkheim saw anomic suicide as resulting from rapid social change.

Durkheim found that suicide rates rose during periods of economic depression, such as the period following the crash of the Paris Bourse (stock exchange) in 1882. However, he also discovered that suicide rates rose during economic prosperity. The conquest of Rome by Victor Emmanuel in 1870 formed the basis of Italian unity and led to an economic boom with rapidly rising salaries and living standards; but it also led to a rising suicide rate. Durkheim reasoned that both booms and slumps brought the uncertainty of anomie - and so more suicides.

Fatalistic

Oppressive societies may produce fatalistic suicides in which people find themselves so oppressed they lose the will to live and prefer to die, “with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline”. In other words, the basic BEIGE survival motivation is compromised through sheer hopelessness. Durkheim gave as an example the suicide of slaves, but he considered this type of suicide to be of little contemporary significance and discussed it in a footnote only. Some sociologists since have hypothesised that it could account for the fairly high levels of suicide in prisons.

A quite spectacular fatalistic suicide in recent times was the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December 2010 in a despairing protest at his hopeless poverty.. His act was imitated across the Middle East by others who also felt trapped in grinding poverty by their governments’ oppressive policies. Bouazizi’s suicide served as the catalyst which triggered the Tunisian revolution and the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ which followed.

Durkheim recognized that egoism and anomie were often found together, as, for example, when divorce occurred. He thought they were problems that affected all industrial societies to a greater or lesser extent. Due to the highly specialised division of labour in such societies, they were less integrated than simple or ‘primitive' societies. On the other hand, pre-industrial societies were more likely to suffer from altruistic and fatalistic suicide.

Positivistic Responses to Durkheim

Sociologists studying suicide who adopt positivistic methods have generally praised most aspects of Durkheim's work.

Maurice Halbwachs (1930) attempted to refine Durkheim's work but did not challenge the use of a 'scientific' approach in the study of suicide. Indeed, he claimed Durkheim had been able to provide “a fully comprehensive treatment of the phenomenon of suicide, which could be modified and added to, but which in principle seems unassailable”. Halbwachs could add to and modify Durkheim's work by making use of both the more recent suicide statistics that had become available and new methods of statistical analysis, such as the use of correlation coefficients. On the whole he confirmed what Durkheim had found. He did argue, however, that Durkheim had overestimated the importance of religion in determining the suicide rate. Halbwachs claimed to have found that differences between living in urban and rural areas had more impact than differences between Catholics and Protestants. Interestingly, a number of studies - such as that of William Eaton, Preben Bo Mortensen & Morten Frydenberg (2000)  - have shown that Schizophrenia is more likely to develop in people in urban rather than rural areas. As a high percentage of schizophrenics commit suicide - around 10% according to DSM IV-TR (2000) - Halbwachs’ relating the incidence of suicide to urban or rural living - is undoubtedly worthy of further consideration.

Jack Gibbs & WaIter Martin (1964) criticized Durkheim for being insufficiently positivistic. In particular, they point out that:-

• The analysis depends upon the concept of social cohesion as Durkheim argues suicide varies as it varies - a negative correlation. Yet Durkheim never provides a clear, unambiguous definition of what he means by ‘social cohesion’. Nor is it obviously operationalisable.

• Durkheim claimed that social integration was linked to religion and family networks but he provides no indication of these claims that can be either validated or falsified. “…one does not see individuals tied to society in any physical sense”. Consequently, it is impossible to test the theory that lack of integration leads to a high suicide rate