Analysis Of Emile Durkheim's Views Of Suicide

In his book, Suicide, Emile Durkheim explores the social reasons that would someone to commit suicide. The basis of his argument laid in his ideas of social integration and social regulation. Social regulation is the many facets in which a person can be involved with society, such as political groups, religious groups, and domestic groups. Social regulation in comparison are the social and moral rules that a society decides what is right and what is wrong. Durkheim believes that people need to find a balance within social integration and social regulation to live a healthy lifestyle.

Durkheim was born on April 15, 1858 and died on November 15, 1917. He grew up in a Jewish family in the alsace region of Eastern France. Durkheim studied society with a different approach than Spencer and Marx, who wrote in terms of the human struggle for survival. Durkheim focused more on the solidarity within a society. He thought that within the biological makeup of human brains allowed for collective conscience.

Suicide is the ultimate defense against life’s trouble as it offers a peaceful sleep, but what dreams may interrupt that sleep? Shakespeare’s Hamlet is discussing about suicide as well as death. Even though death offer peace, but the afterlife which is unknown makes people cowardly to commit suicide. Suicide is a motif that appears frequently throughout Shakespeare 's Hamlet. Hamlet and Ophelia are the two characters in Hamlet who are involved with suicide, although Hamlet only contemplates it, but Ophelia actually commits suicide in Act 4.Throughout the novel, the act of suicide is treat religiously, morally and aesthetically.

People who committed suicide were in a state of immense despair; they could not see hope and find the courage to go on. They wanted to end their pain. At the same time, they might not realize that they were also being selfish.

The second hypothesis to be analysed is the theory that divorced people tend to commit suicide more often compared to married people, and married people commit suicide less than single people. The suicides of divorcees can be illustrated by this quote from the book “Suicide”: “The state of conjugal anomy, produced by the institution of divorce, thus explains the parallel development of divorces and suicides. Accordingly, the suicides of husbands which increase the number of voluntary deaths in countries where there are many divorces, form a division of anomic suicide.” (273)

The issue of suicide has been around for quite a long time since the Middle Ages. Suicide still continues, which hasn’t disappeared, in fact, it has increased over time because due to lack of effort of attending therapy and seeking the help they need to solve

Anomic suicide occurs when there is lack of regulation in the society. This type of suicide is dell to a sudden breakdown of the social equilibrium such as sudden business depression. Therefore we can say that this type of suicide is triggered by disastrous change in the life of an individual. Egoistic suicide occurs when an individual feels very isolated from the social group. It results from the lack of integration of the individual into his or her social group.

There are 175 countries in the world right now (Countries). The United States is ranked 48th in suicides. An alarming total of 44,193 people commits suicide here, each year (List). It’s daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, friends, and coworkers taking their life. It’s everyday people taking their life.

Because of how closely religion and moral was tied together, suicide was considered morally wrong due to its classification as a sin. Hamlet himself claims in the «O´ that this too, too solid flesh would melt» soliloquy that he would commit suicide had it not been deemed wrong by the church. In other words, the play Hamlet treats suicide as a

Compared to countries outside Hong Kong, China, America, Singapore, Japan and Korean also find out the suicidal rate of elderly were also higher than any other people in different age group. Although sociologisit Emile Durkheim thinks that the suicide rates for a society typically shows a stable distribiution from year to year, there are always identification of periodic fluctuations and patterns of suicide

Durkheim describes suicide as an action that a person takes with the awareness that it will lead to their death. He looked at various types of suicide including egoistic suicide and altruistic suicide that come from integration but he put much of his focus onto anomic suicide that comes from regulation. In preventing suicide we can note that fewer suicides occur during wars as this brings people together and gives the society a collective mentality once more. In preventing anomic suicide the society would need to become more of a collective. Thus separation between the group and the individual continues.

According to Emile Durkheim, there are four different types of suicide. These include: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic suicide. Durkheim’s main focus on studying suicide is understanding what makes a person commit suicide and the influences and factors that lead that person to carry out the act (Open College). Egoistic suicide is when an individual has low social interactions with others, they have feelings

CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF EMILE DURKHEIM’S THEORY OF SUICIDE Emile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 -15 November, 1917) was a French sociologist and is mostly famous for his monograph the theory of Suicide (1897). He is also a French sociologist, social psychologist and a philosopher and has formally established the academic discipline and is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. His most important work was apparently a case study of suicide which is a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, founded modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. If we have a look at the suicide statistics it is known that precisely, 11.1 out of every 100,000 people have died by suicide (WHO 2011).

Emile Durkheim, born in 1858 was an eminent proponent of Sociology from France, considered to be one of the greatest in his field alongside Karl Marx and Max Weber. Durkheim aimed to study society taking an evolutionary approach, keeping in mind that society is composed of individuals. However, it was not essentially the aggregate sum of each individual’s behaviors, actions and thoughts. Durkheim endeavored to understand transformation of society, from traditional to modern, where solidarity changes from mechanical to organic because of the phenomenon of ‘division of labour’.

The statistics about teenage runaways, alcoholism, drug problems, pregnancy, eating disorders, and suicide are startling. Every year, thousands of people succeed in taking their lives and even more have attempted suicide at some point in their lives. Although we have reached the stage that hearing about suicide is now common, it is was viewed as trivial and petty back then. It seems like a reverse spectrum