Lecture Notes
(Thanks to Dr. Peter Bearman for the framework of these notes)
Lectures on Suicide
1) Plotting the suicide rate (that is, the number of suicides 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. However, in all societies, as well
as in the U.S., there is a slow linear increase in the suicide
rate over time. This is true for the aggregate and for the trend in
subgroups of societies: say, among
women vs. men, blacks vs. whites, poor vs. rich, and so on.
2) How are we to make sense of this stability of the suicide rate within
any given society or
subgroup? Of course, members of a society won't meet every year to
fix quotas for who and how
many people can take their own lives during the year. Suicide is a
very individual act, and yet the
same proportion of suicide is reproduced every year despite people's
own, individual agendas and
motives?
Dewey, who counted words in English texts, found out that, on the average,
the word "they" appears
to be the 27th most frequent word in all kinds of texts. What is the
reason for this constant relative
frequency of the word "they"? The organizing principle is the sentence
structure, namely the grammar
of the English language.
The grammar of society is the social structure. As the English grammar
produces stable word
counts across different kinds of texts, the social structure produces
social facts. Social facts are
regularly observable facts which are exogenous to individual members
of a society (that is, facts that
originate not in the individual but "outside" of him or her.) Yet social
facts like the suicide rate are the
product of so many individual acts independent from each other. We
need a theory of how social
structure induces the suicide rate. In order to develop a theory, lets
have a closer look at the
empirical findings and see if patterns emerge which might help to explain
the stability of the suicide
rate as well as its slow linear increase over extended periods of time.
3) Timing of suicides
Think of the U.S. today or France of the 1890's--what might be the months
of the year, the days of
the week, or the hours of the day when suicides are most likely to
happen? Emile Durkheim, who
developed the concept of social facts and a theory to account for the
suicide rate, looked at data
from France and other countries or regions from the 1890's.
You might think, and many people do, that suicides are likely to peak
say, in December, around
Christmas, when people feel most isolated and lonely; another guess
is April, when taxes are due and
financial pressures make feel people depressed. Monday, when people
have to go back to work,
might be a likely day; Sunday, when people are in a reflexive mood
and again, more likely to get
depressed; or Friday, after the strains of a stressful week; or Saturday,
when loneliness is most
noticeable after a work week with intense contacts with others. Accordingly,
in regard to hours of
the day, late night comes to mind as a period of relative isolation,
and so on.
4) Bad theories
These are some of the guesses we came up with during the class on how
timing of suicides might be
distributed. All these guesses rest on theories of depression, loneliness,
isolation, reflexivity, strain or
stress. These theories can be tested empirically. First, one has to
look at the suicide rate or death
rate and look for certain peaks and down swings. One can look at the
financial situation of people
who committed suicide or tried to do so, at their living arrangements
and so on. Of course, one
would need a control group to make sure that the pressure was indeed
higher for those who
committed suicide.
a. timing continued
A closer look at the data on timing of suicides shows that many of
our guesses were wrong. Indeed, the
suicide rate peaks during spring and fall when economic activity is
highest. This is true for France in
the 1890's as well as for the U.S. today, although the pattern is less
pronounced in the latter case.
Suicides peak from Tuesday through Thursday and slow down considerably
during the weekend. In
the U.S. today, there is also a peak on Mondays, a pattern which has
been called "stormy Monday."
Finally, suicides are most likely to occur in the hours from 10-12
am and from 2-4 pm. Again, this
holds for France and the U.S. although the pattern is attenuated in
the U.S. today.
Hence, suicides occur when social life is at its most intense. This
finding is consistent with the
increase of the suicide rate over time as social life becomes more
intense in modern society. The
suicide rate thus can be seen as an index of modernity of a society.
How can we account for the
empirical findings, which seem to contradict our intuitive guesses
that suicides are caused by
loneliness, depression, and stress? The variations of suicide rates
across subgroups might help to
develop a theory to account for these counter-intuitive findings.
B. variations by subgroups
and theories to account for them.
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These data show that the modal suicide is a white, Protestant, male
professional around 35. What do
these categories have in common? We need to identify a structure of
social relations which
accounts for the differences between groups and which is approximated
by the classification given in
the above table. Generally, involvement in tightly knit social circles,
with multiplex ties (where your
neighbor is likely to be also your friend, your co-worker, and goes
to the same church) protects from
suicide. Conversely, where social ties are more fragmented while social
contacts intensify, where
these little societies break down, the suicide rate will go up. This
is typically the case in modern
society, where people are more individuated.
Workers, for example, have a richer social life than professionals.
By the structure of their work, they
are more likely to foster communal sentiments, external pressure forces
them to form social relations
with co-workers, and they are far more likely to be physically near
to them. Women are protected
from suicide especially where they have traditional roles, are married
and have children--in a way, by
virtue of their exclusion form the labor market and their isolation
from the conditions of modernity.
One might speculate that the sex differences in the suicide rate will
disappear once women fully
obtain equal rights and equal status.
As Durkheim emphasized, 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.
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.
This is not to be understood as a contradiction to our earlier assertion,
that suicide peaks where
social life is at its most intense. Where people have contacts to many
others, to many other groups
but are not embedded in any one of those, there are fewer buffers between
life and persons. In order
to understand better the historical transition from embeddedness in
small social worlds to the intense
but loosely knit social life typical of modernity, we need a way to
represent social structure more
clearly. Refer to diagram from class, which we will meet more often
during this class. People
are represented as circles (nodes), and social relations are represented
as lines (ties). In the upper
right cell, labeled altruistic, you see what might be called a clique,
where everybody is tied to
everybody else, yielding a tightly knit pattern of social relations.
Durkheim argues, this pattern is
characterized as one where people are tied to each other by mechanical
solidarity. Mechanical
solidarity is based on similarity or homogeneity between persons, who
all belong to the same group,
know the same people, and follow the same norms.
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By looking at the contributions to the suicide rate made by different
groups of people, we saw that
categories are a proxy for two classes of social relations: embeddedness
versus isolation, and
identified a historical trend toward isolation in modern societies.
Durkheim identified two independent
dimensions of social structure as he developed a theory to account
for differences in the suicide rate
across groups and societies. The extent to which people are integrated
into society and by which
they are regulated or governed by norms pertaining to that society
determines the suicide rate.
These dimensions form the axes of our diagram. Normally, these two
dimensions move together: high
integration in a community goes together with following the norms governing
the community.
Following the norms of the community re-enforces integration.
c. forms of suicide and historical transition toward egoism
The historical transition identified earlier moves from high integration
and regulation (altruistic suicide,
upper right cell) to low integration and regulation (egoistic suicide,
lower left cell.) 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. This situation corresponds to the classic existential
dilemma: by losing the
"other," the self is lost.
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
Buddhistic 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.
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.)
The same situation
occurs where divorces are possible and frequent; conjugal ties are
weakened, people are less
governed by norms and feel free "to look around."
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 (upper left cell) 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.
The reverse situation, namely excessive regulation without integration,
leads to fatalistic suicide
( lower right cell.) The slave is integrated only via the tie to his
or her master, the future is
fundamentally blocked by excessive regulation. Durkheim's example 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.
transition
toward modernity
Now you know what sociology does. It explains individual behavior with
its social correlates.
Creating models of social relations, which are represented in ideal
types, sociologists try to make
predictions about social facts like the suicide rate. A model of social
structure with the two
dimensions of integration and regulation enabled Durkheim to explain
the counter-intuitive empirical
findings regarding the suicide rate. He found that modern life increasingly
creates conditions favoring
egoistic suicide, caused by the break-down of tightly knit small worlds
and of over-arching norms.
This diagnosis is closely related to the problem of order, which is
what sociology is all about.
the problem of order
Given that society seems to be constituted by individuals pursuing
their self-interest, using others as
means to achieve their own ends, how can society "hang together?" In
other words, how do you get
a society out of asocial people? This was not seen as a problem before
three things happened in
Europe. First, the industrial revolution created new
classes of people and new forms of social
relations. People were stripped away from rural settings with their
community-based economy and
established hierarchies. The new, market-based economy lead to a great
deal of geographical and
social mobility. The spheres of production and reproduction were separated.
Instead of the mutual
obligations which tied rural workers to landed aristocracy, industrial
workers were free to sell their
labor power wherever it was needed. The industrial revolution thus
"freed up" masses of people who
were formerly closely tied to local settings, and changed their vision
of the world. Second, the
democratic revolutions in England around 1740, in France
1789, and in 1848 all over Europe,
challenged the traditional ways of ruling. Individuals were seen as
having the right and capacity to
decide for themselves instead of being guided by a lord or monarch.
Finally, the confrontation with
other societies--in Latin America, Africa, and North
America, showed other ways to organize
social life than the one which had prevailed in Europe. Previously,
the social order was seen as given
by God. Now, people had to acknowledge that there were other ways to
organize human
experience.
Intellectuals reflecting on these issues had the sense that the social
fabric was completely falling apart.
Theories flourished to explain why it didn't, or how it could be hindered
from doing so. New
sciences, like sociology and economics emerged to try and solve the
problem of order. Hobbes held
that people voluntarily surrender their rights to one person or ruler
in order to keep society together.
Rousseau's theory of the social contract is another example. Adam Smith
asserted that there is no
problem of order: if everybody followed their own interests, the "invisible
hand" of the market, supply
and demand will regulate morals and create a social order based on
the "greater happiness of all."
Sociology proceeded from these questions and created models of society
which allowed for social
order and also for people as agents of their own lives.