A Socio-Psychological Investigation of Suicide

Abstract

There are several rather distinct approaches to the investigagation of the phenomena of suicide. The ecologic, anthropologic, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic points of view immediately come to mind. Of these, perhaps the best known approach to the analysis of suicidal data is that generally called “sociological.” It has, by now, a time-honored tradition and includes what is probably the best-known single work on the topic, Durkheim’s Le Suicide.⁴ Published in 1897 in France, it established a model for sociological investigations of committed suicide, and also delineated an essentially psychological classification of types (anomie, altruistic, and egoistic). There have been many subsequent studies of this genre, e.g. the monographs and books by Cavan on suicide in Chicago;² Schmid on suicide in Seattle¹⁵ and Minneapolis;¹⁶ Sainsbury on suicide in London;¹⁴ Dublin and Bunze1,³ and Henry and Short⁶ on suicide in the United States. All fall within the sociological tradition of taking a plot of ground—a city or a country—and figuratively or literally reproducing its map several times to show its socially shady (and topographically shaded) areas and their multifarious relationships to suicide rates. This kind of study certainly has the merit of employing the available sociological and suicidal data, but it also has the characteristic of being focused in its conclusions on generalizations about suicide which are necessarily couched in socio-economic terminology. One result of this outcome is that the individual who has aspirations for effecting any kind of reduction in suicide rates is limited in his range of possible actions by virtue of the fact that he is given little information about the highly individual and personal psychological aspects of the suicidal behaviors.