5.4a2 Durkheim’s Study of Suicide

Another significant contribution of Émile Durkheim’s research on deviant behavior was his scientific approach to studying social facts. Social facts are external factors that limit agency (see Chapter 1). Specifically, Durkheim (1979) analyzed European government data on suicide rates to understand the social causes of suicide. Cultural attitudes toward suicide vary, but in Durkheim’s time and place, most people viewed it as deviant. Suicide is a death that is self-inflicted with the intent to die. Figure 5.7 includes contact information for anyone needing help.

Durkheim focused on deaths from suicide because people understood them to be individual acts of deviance free from the influence of social factors. However, analyzing government data, he described how social integration and regulation contribute to distinct types of suicide. Social integration refers to the strength of an individual’s connections to their social groups. Social regulation refers to the volume of rules and expectations that guide one’s day-to-day life. According to Durkheim, dying by suicide is related to an individual’s levels of social integration and social regulation. Using social integration and social regulation as variables, Durkheim identified four types of suicide (see Table 5.1).

Durkheim’s Four Types of Suicide

Egoistic suicide occurs when there are low levels of social integration. That is, an individual is more isolated from larger social groups. As people age, for example, they often retire from employment and typically no longer offer daily care for their children. These changes to their daily lives can lower their level of social integration. U.S. suicide rates are correlated with age and gender. Figure 5.8 shows that older men have the highest suicide rates compared to women of the same age and compared to all adults aged 25 to 64. Suicide deaths among older people can often be classified as egoistic suicides.

Altruistic suicides occur when individuals are highly integrated into a group—as are high school students, for example. When a death from suicide occurs in a high school, the risk of other such deaths increases. A suicide cluster refers to a greater-than-expected number of suicides, typically among people who share sociodemographic factors, usually connected by geography and occurring within a brief period (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024b).

Mueller and Abrutyn (2024) conducted in-depth interviews with 110 members of a community that had experienced a suicide cluster in a local high school. They found that the community had elevated levels of social integration and social regulation. By putting pressure on people to live up to the community’s real or perceived expectations, these elevated levels put people at risk of suicide behavior. In cases of altruistic suicide, like suicide clusters, a person experiences too much social integration and social regulation.

Anomic suicide is a result of the loss of norms due to significant social changes, such as a natural disaster or financial strain from a job loss or economic recession. The expectations of daily life have fundamentally changed, and people experience anomie. In other words, insufficient social regulation can be harmful. However, research is mixed on the relationship between anomic conditions and suicide. For example, the U.S. suicide rate declined in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which produced anomic conditions (Bastiampillai et al., 2022). In contrast, there is a relationship between economic recessions and suicide rates, but only among working-age adults (25 to 64) (Luo et al., 2011).

Fatalistic suicide materializes from too much social regulation and can be understood as a form of escape. These suicides occur among incarcerated people, enslaved people, and victims of intimate partner violence. In such cases, excessive social regulation is dysfunctional. Figure 5.9 shows that incarcerated people in the United States have higher suicide rates compared to the overall population.

Durkheim’s analysis showed that social factors influence even acts understood to be highly individualistic, such as suicide. More recent sociological research on suicide behaviors confirms the importance of social factors, including integration and regulation, in their occurrence (see Mueller et al., 2021).