Functionalist view of suicide Essay

People who commit suicide do not really want to end their lives as many seek the attention and acceptance they so dearly want from society. Thinking along the lines of the Sociological Imagination we need to understand the social forces, or the lack thereof, that drives people to commit suicide. Emile Durkheim discovered that levels of integration into society played a big role with suicide.

Emile Durkheim was one of the most influential people to write about suicide and its causes. Suicide had previously been thought to be a moral and psychological problem whereas Durkheim related suicide to sociological problems in modern society. He believed and worked to prove that suicide was not related to individualism but linked to the effects of the external influences of modern society. External social influences upon an individual covered the broad and varied aspects such as culture, religion and family. Durkheim believed that suicide was directly related to the level of social integration and/or regulation of a person in society. He developed groups into which an individual was categorised according to their level of integration

Throughout this essay, we will be looking a Durkheim’s analysis of suicide and whether his ideas on suicide were right in his time, and whether they are still relevant in today’s society. Emile Durkheim described ‘suicide’ as a term “applied to any death which is the direct or indirect result of a positive or negative act accomplished by the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result” (Durkheim, Suicide: a Study in Sociology, originally published 1897, 1970). Positive acts were acts that were undertaking with the intention to produce death. Negative acts were actually the distinct lack of survival acts undertaken, with the knowledge that without these acts, death would be the result. As far as Durkheim was concerned, although suicide itself is a very individual act, the reasoning behind suicide was due to predominantly social factors (Durkheim 1970, p44). Suicide was sociological, not psychological. His research was based not on the personality traits of those who had committed suicide, but instead at the suicide rates of different countries compared to the social factors that link the countries together (Durkheim 1970, p40).

As I was reading through the different views on the causes of suicide, I thought that the sociocultural view made most sense for me. It made sense due to the claim that a person’s connections with social groups, religions, and communities can determine suicide probability (Comer, 2014). I imagine a sliding spectrum where people who are very invested in everything around them are on one end and on the other are people who don’t care about society. The two ends are the high suicide probability areas. Altruistic suicides where lives are sacrificed would fall on the invested end of the spectrum while the egoistic suicides which society has no control over a person and anomic suicides where a person’s social environment fails to provide structure

Suicide is the intentional taking of one's own life and sociologists over the years have tried to put forward various explanations for why someone may do this. Within sociology there are many different views on suicide on the causes and explanations for it, these come from two main methodologies which are Positivists who believe that sociology is a science and they should aim to make causal laws on suicide rates, compared to Interpretivists who believe that they should look for meaning behind occurrences and certain individuals experiences before the suicide. Other perspectives also put in their views on what they believe to explain

Suicide is the act of killing yourself. It is the 11th leading cause of death in America (CDC 2009). I have never had any intentions on committing suicide and I never really understood why people commit suicide that’s why I chose this topic to help me understand what problems people go through that makes them do such a thing. Sociology is the study of social behavior and the culture of humans. There are numerous reasons like financial stress, family problems or mental health disorders that lead to suicide. The number one cause of suicide is untreated depression. The issues that were just listed are some social conditions from society that results in a suicidal

The topic of suicide can easily become uncomfortable when discussing. Thoughts of family or friends using a permanent solution to a temporary problem is hard to grasp. Why would an individual choose to do this? Did it stem from personal reasons or was it fueled by a number of out-siding factors. Using Sociology we can decipher human behavior and gain an insight into a global issue .

Durkheim does not see egoism, altruism, anomie and fatalism as types of suicide, but types of social structure that highlight the presence or lack of integration and regulation. It must be stressed that this excess/lack of integration and regulation are not seen as direct causes of suicide, rather Durkheim sees a number of voluntary deaths in society as inevitable; integration and regulation are merely prophylactic to suicidal impulses, which when taken to excess or dramatically reduced, fail to act as a preventative, and so suicides occur. This clarification is an important strength of Durkheim’s theory: it allows the biography of the individuals who kill themselves to vary, while still explaining underlying pressures/lack of to explain their deaths, and the varying suicide rates between groups.

Furthermore, social scientists have not been too involved in the topic of suicide. Since 1990-2009 there have not been many article on the topic and the disinterest can derive from the presumption that suicide is a lonesome act. The article “Suicide and the Creative Class,” states that, “Durkheim ([1897] 2006) illustrated that suicide is a social phenomenon by stating that levels of integration and

Classic theory was used as a tool for sociologist to view society; there are different theories that help us focus on different aspects of society. In this essay I will discuss the various forms of suicide defined by Durkheim. I will then predicate this explanation by resources to Durkheim meta theory that we 've discussed in lectures. Lastly I will explain why Durkheim’s work Suicide is significant for the discipline of sociology. The action of suicide has been in society since the dawn of man. Before Durkheim’s research, no one has been able to thoroughly explain why suicide occurs within a society. What 's so great about Durkheim’s research is that it shows different reasons behind why people commit suicide. His research also shows who

Durkheim did not feel satisfied with individualized explanations for suicide such as alcoholism or depression. He felt there needed to be a stronger explanation and sought to explain how suicide was truly brought about through social forces. He constructed a coordinate system that contained social integration (how well you are connected with society) on the y-axis, and social regulation (what you expect daily from the world) on the x-axis. You need to maintain a position somewhere near the middle of the two to have a low risk for suicide. This graph led him to four different types of suicide. Egoistic suicide occurs when an individual is not very connected to society. Altruistic suicide is the opposite, where an individual is too integrated.

When it comes to suicide often as individuals we describe suicide as something that is caused by an individuals experience that may include how someone lives, personalities, and religion. While also including that there are no biological influence that may be passed on from genetics, genes, and heredity. However, Durkheim argues against suicide being caused by social factors and how involved or integrated the individuals is in connection to society. Usually when asked why someone decided to kill himself or herself we usually think of what he/she was thinking about in their mind. Almost pertaining to the individuals decision we wouldn’t be thinking about society as something that could have caused suicide but instead we would shift our focus on the individual. However, it seems as if the individuals decision is not the sole focus of suicide. Though the acts are committed by a single person there are various reasons someone would commit this act.

Durkheim views suicide as a marker for the health and well being of society, if the suicide rates begin to start changing then that means there is a major change going on in our culture. Suicide is all how you about how well or not well you feel connected to society and the social norms of society. Every different type of suicide says and shows different things about that individual and the society they are in and what society is going through. Anomie, is a when society has little to no standards or norms. Egoistic suicide is one who has low social interaction with others in society and they feel lonely and feel as if they are an outsider and take their own life. Altruistic suicide is when someone gives up their own life for the good of the

Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a purely individual decision but French sociologist Emile Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed in the influence of society on the individual and that if anything can explain that relation, it is suicide. His use of the data of suicide, not specific cases and reports, to study the societal trends reveals his true subject of study: society as a whole and its role in the individual experience. Durkheim uses the study of suicide via the quantitative methodological approach as a tool to study society as a broader whole.

Durkheim’s view and understanding of suicide differs from that of psychologists on the grounds of reasons as to why people commit suicide. A psychologist would attribute a variety of internal reasons like unhappiness, feeling of lacking somewhere or that of decreasing self worth as reasons why a person commits suicide. Durkheim has a very different way of looking at a suicide. He believes that it is an outcome of the social context in which the individual dwells. He attributes social and societal reasons that are external to the individual but, still tend to have a profound impact on him/her. According to him, it is the surroundings of an individual that provoke him/her to commit suicide. Durkheim believed that the consistency of suicide rates was a social fact that was affected by the degree to which people were coordinated through forces of binding and togetherness in society. According to Durkheim, suicide is connected to each case of death which comes from a positive or negative act, carried out by a person, who has a realization that it will create this outcome and will bring an end to his/her life. Durkheim tries to find out social reasons for suicide (not individual or mental)