Suicide, Durkheim's third major work, is of great importance because it is his first serious effort to establish empiricism in sociology, an empiricism that would provide a sociological explanation for a phenomenon traditionally regarded as exclusively psychological and individualistic.

 Durkheim proposed this definition of suicide: "the term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result". Durkheim used this definition to separate true suicides from accidental deaths.

Durkheim insisted that the study of society must not

rely on psychological factors alone (reductionism).  Rather, social phenomenon must be considered as a different class or level of fact.  To demonstrate the power of these social facts in determining human behavior, Durkheim studied suicide.  Suicide was an action that was widely perceived as one of the most intensely individual acts, one that is purely determined by psychological and biographical factors.

But facts like these cannot explain variations in suicide rates among different racial, ethnic, religious, and occupational groups.  Durkheim reasoned that while suicide occurs in all societies, the suicide rate for various groups are often both different than other groups within the same society and stable over time.  These differences and stability in group rates indicated that there was something other than psychology involved in the decision to commit suicide.  Why is it that Protestants are more prone to suicide than Catholics?  Why are there stable rates of suicide, year after year, within the same groups and societies?  Why do rates differ between age groups within the same society?  It is simply impossible, Durkheim insisted, to explain or interpret the characteristics and behaviors of human groups on a psychological or biological basis.  Much of who and what we are, of how we behave and what we believe, is due to social forces.

In order to explain differential rates of suicide in various religious and occupational groups, Durkheim studied the ways these groups brought about social cohesion and solidarity among their members.  He hypothesized that a significantly higher rate of suicide in a particular group was an indication that the social cohesion of that group was weak, and that its members were no longer protected during personal crises.  Through an examination of government data, Durkheim demonstrated that suicide varies with the degree of social integration.

He then collected several European nations' suicide rate statistics, which proved to be relatively constant among those nations and among smaller demographics within those nations. Thus, a collective tendency towards suicide was discovered.

Of equal importance to his methodology, Durkheim drew theoretical conclusions on the social causes of suicide. He proposed four types of suicide, based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation.

Egoistic suicide

The concept of ‘egoism’ developed in the nineteenth-century industrial society which refers to the breakdown of social ties and pursuit of private interests. The individual is detached from society and retreats into himself. It is characterised by excessive self-reflection on personal matters and with drawl from the outside world. According to Durkheim, egoism occurs when the social bonds binding the individuals are slackened are not sufficiently integrated at the points where the individual is in contact with the wider society. Egoism thus results from too much individualism and the weakening of the social fabric.

Egoistic suicide results from too little social integration. Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. An example Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, particularly males, who, with less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals, committed suicide at higher rates than unmarried people.

Durkheim believed, that egoistic suicide is a common feature of industrial society because the bonds ( reinforced by religion, family, political group etc ) connecting the individuals and the social institutions are slackened and grow weak.

Altruistic suicide

The second type, Altruistic suicide, was a result of too much integration. It occurred at the opposite end of the integration scale as egoistic suicide. Self-sacrifice was the defining trait, where individuals were so integrated into social groups that they lost sight of their individuality and became willing to sacrifice themselves to the group's interests, even if that sacrifice was their own life. The most common cases of altruistic suicide occurred among members of the military.

• Optional altruistic suicide is a form of suicide where individuals consider taking their own lives as a social duty. Society attaches honour to the renunciation of life and the dignity of the group is considered more important than the individual’s life.
• Acute altruistic suicide is the most extreme form of altruistic self-destruction. In this case, the individual’s attachment to the group is so great that the individual renounces life for the actual felt ‘joy of sacrifice’. Examples of this can be found in Hindu society where suicide takes the form of religious hysteria and is looked upon with enthusiasm and great excitement. Individuals believe that their true self can only be realised when they will renounce themselves for the social good. Altruistic suicide occurs because of an excess of social integration and attachment that develops within the confines of the group. Individualism hardly develops since the purposes of the group are valued over individual existence. Under these circumstances, acute altruistic suicide is the clearest case of suicide imposed by social ends and is thus a form of suicide induced by society. Examples of acute altruistic suicide can be found in the case of the suicide bombings that occurred during the terrorist attacks in the United States on 9/11. These types of suicide also include cases of military suicides.

Anomic suicide

On the second scale, that of moral regulation lays the other two forms of suicide, the first of which is Anomic suicide, located on the low end. Anomic suicide was of particular interest to Durkheim, for he divided it into four categories: acute and chronic economic anomie, and acute and chronic domestic anomie. Each involved an imbalance of means and needs, where means were unable to fulfil needs.

Each category of anomic suicide can be described briefly as follows:

Acute economic anomie: sporadic decreases in the ability of traditional institutions (such as religion, guilds, pre-industrial social systems, etc.) to regulate and fulfill social needs.

Chronic economic anomie: long term diminution of social regulation. Durkheim identified this type with the ongoing industrial revolution, which eroded traditional social regulators and often failed to replace them. Industrial goals of wealth and property were insufficient in providing happiness, as was demonstrated by higher suicide rates among the wealthy than among the poor.

Acute domestic anomie: sudden changes on the micro social level resulted in an inability to adapt and therefore higher suicide rates. Widowhood is a prime example of this type of anomie.

Chronic domestic anomie: referred to the way marriage as an institution regulated the sexual and behavioural means-needs balance among men and women. Marriage provided different regulations for each, however. Bachelors tended to commit suicide at higher rates than married men because of a lack of regulation and established goals and expectations. On the other hand, marriage has traditionally served to over-regulate the lives of women by further restricting their already limited opportunities and goals. Unmarried women, therefore, do not experience chronic domestic anomie nearly as often as do unmarried men.

Fatalistic suicide

The final type of suicide is Fatalistic suicide, "at the high extreme of the regulation continuum". This type Durkheim only briefly describes, seeing it as a rare phenomenon in the real world. Examples include those with overregulated, unrewarding lives such as slaves, childless married women, and young husbands. Durkheim never specifies why this type is generally unimportant in his study.

Durkheim felt that his empirical study of suicide had discovered the structural forces that caused anomie and egoism, and these forces were natural results of the decline of mechanical solidarity and the slow rise of organic solidarity due to the division of labour and industrialism. Also of importance was Durkheim's discovery that these forces affected all social classes. This is where the true sociological value of Suicide emerges. Because social forces that affect human behaviour are the result of previous human actions, it is the role of sociology to expose and understand these actions as the foundations of societal structure. These structural phenomena are at the root of human society, and through scientific, statistical methods -- integrated with informed theory and educated conjecture -- the function of these structures can be comprehended. In other words, Suicide is a vital work because it is the first effective combination of sociological theory and empiricism to explain a social phenomenon.

Criticisms

Durkheim’s theory of suicide has contributed much about the study of suicides because he has laid stress on social rather than on biological or personal factors. He has very well pointed out that social disorganizations results in suicide and in societies where there is social solidarity chances of suicide are much less. But the main drawback of the theory is that he has laid too much stress only on one factor, namely social factor and has forgotten or under-stressed other factors, thereby making his theory defective and only one sided. It must be accepted that along with social factors, biological and personal factors do exist which force the people to commit suicide.

According to Ritzer, Durkheim was making two arguments. First, he argued that different collectivities have different collective consciousness or collective representation. These produce different social currents, and these lead to different suicide rates. By studying different groups and societies, some of these currents can be analyzed, and the effect of these on suicide can be determined. Second, changes in the collective consciousness lead to changes in social currents. These are then associated with changes in suicide rates.

Durkheim ran into difficulties, for this definition failed to distinguish between two very different sorts of death: the victim of hallucination who leaps from an upper story window while thinking it on a level with the ground; and the sane individual who does the same thing knowing that it will lead to his death. The first was that such intention behind action which results into deaths varies considerably from one person or situation to another. At what point, for example, does the death of a professional daredevil or that of a man neglectful of his health cease to be an "accident" and start to become "suicide"? Suicides, in short, are simply an exaggerated form of common practices.

His analysis has been criticized on the basis that the data he used was inadequate and invalid. The police records, which Durkheim referred, are highly unreliable as number of cases of suicide is not reported even due to the stigma attached. He has not taken attempted suicides into consideration. Suicide among Catholics may be low due to the stigma attached to suicide.

The Sociology of suicide

Suicide rates were relatively stable in a particular society over a period of time.

The suicide rate is therefore a factual order, unified and definite as is shown by both its permanence and its variability. 

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. 

Types of Suicide

From his analysis of the relationship between suicide rates and a range of social factors.  Durkheim began to distinguish types of suicide.  He believed that the suicide rates were dependent upon the degree to which individuals were integrated into social groups and the degree to which society regulated individual behaviour.  On this basis he distinguished four types of suicide: egoistic altruistic, anomic and fatalistic.

The total number of suicides was determined by such unobservable “collective tendencies”, which ‘have an existence of their own’ and are as ‘real as cosmic forces’. 

According to some of today’s sociologists such as Steve Taylor, Durkheim adopted a realist rather than a positivist view of science.

Positive responses to Durkheim

As early as 1930 Maurice Halbwachs carried out a review of his work.  Halbwachs attempted to refine Durkheim’s work and did not challenge the use of a ‘scientific’ approach in the study of suicide.  Halbwachs could add to and modify Durkheim’s work by making use of both the more recent suicide statistics analysis such as the use of correlation coefficients.  On the whole he confirmed what Durkheim had found.  Durkheim had overestimated the importance of religion in determining the suicide rate.

Jack P. Gibbs and Walter T. Martin (1964) suggested that Durkheim failed to define the concept of ‘integration’ in a sufficiently precise and measurable way.  They point out that ‘one does not see individuals tied to society in any physical sense.’  Consequently it was impossible to test he theory that lack of integration led to a high suicide rate.  They therefore proposed that ‘status integration’ could be used as an indictor of social integration.  Status integration concerns the extent to which individuals occupy sets of social roles that are commonly found together.  People with a high degree of status integration have job, family and other statuses that are commonly grouped together.

Interpretive Theories of Suicide

Interpretive sociologists tend to make such stronger attacks on Durkheim’s study of suicide than positivists.  One of the best known interpretive critics of Durkheim is J.D. Douglas (1967).  Douglas particularly criticizes the use of official statistics in the study of suicide, questioning their validity.  Douglas sees suicide statistics as the result of negotiations between the different parties involved.  Douglas’s second main criticism of Durkheim is that it was ridiculous for Durkheim to treat all suicides as the same types of act without investigating the meaning attached to the act by those who took their own life.  Douglas nevertheless claims that the most common social meanings of suicide in Western industrial society are; transformation of the soul (for example suicide as a way of getting to heaven); transformation of the self (suicide as a means of getting others to think of you differently); duicide as a means of achieving fellow-feeling(or sympathy); and suicide as  a means of getting revenge by making others feel guilty.

Jean Baechler – Suicide as Problem solving

French sociologist Jean Baechler (1979) makes extensive use of case studies in existing literature and he classifies suicides in existing literature and he classifies suicides according to their meanings.  He sees suicidal behaviour as a way of responding to and trying to solve a problem.  From this perspective it then becomes possible to classify suicides according to the type of solution they offer and the type of situation they are a response to: in other words, according to the end pursued by the suicidal individual.   On the basis Baechler divides suicides into four main types:

• Escapist suicides,
• Aggressive suicides,
• Oblative suicides  
• Ludic suicides. 

Criticism  of interpretive theories

Phenomenological sociologists have taken this type of criticism to its logical conclusion by denying there can be any objective data on which to base an explanation of suicide.

J. Maxwell Atkinson’s study of suicide (Atkinson, 1978) does not accept that a ‘real’ rate of suicide exists as an objective reality waiting to be discovered.  Thus, with reference to suicide the appropriate question for sociologists to ask is, in Atkinson’s words, “How do deaths get categorized as suicide?”

Particular modes of dying are judged to be more or less likely to indicate suicide.  Road deaths are rarely interpreted as an indicator for suicide, whereas drowning, handing gassing and drug overdose are more likely to be seen as such.

Steve Taylor – beyond positivism and phenomenology

Taylor conducted a study of ‘persons under trains’ people who met their death when they were hit by tube trains on the London Underground.  Over a 12-months period the found 32 cases where there were no strong clues as to the reason for death.  Nevertheless, 17 cases resulted in suicide verdicts, 5 were classified as accidental deaths and the remaining 10 produced open verdicts.  People with a history of mental illness and those who had suffered some form of social failure or social disgrace were more likely to have death recorded as suicide.  He argues that suicides and suicide attempts are either ‘ectopic’- they result from what a person thinks about themselves or “symphysic’- they result from a person’s relationship with others.  Suicides and suicide attempts are also related either to certainty or to uncertainty- people are sure or unsure about themselves or abut others.  Thus, like Durkheim, themselves or about others.  Thus, like Durkheim, Taylor distinguishes four types of suicide connected to diametrically opposed situations.  In Taylor’s theory, however, they are situations faced by particular individuals and are not related so closely to the wider functioning of society.