Explore the vast range of titles available.

Durkeim's book on suicide, first published in 1897, is widely regarded as a classic text, and is essential reading for any student of Durkheim's thought and sociological method. This book examines the continuing importance of Durkheim's methodology. The wide-ranging chapters cover such issues as the use of statistics, explanation of suicide, anomie and religion and the morality of suicide. It will be of vital interest to any serious scholar of Durkheim's thought and to the sociologist looking for a fresh methodological perspective. 1. Introduction W.S.F. Pickering and Geoffrey Walford 2. Emile Durkheim's contribution to the sociological explanation of suicide Luigi Tomasi 3. The deconstruction of social action: the 'reversal' of Durkheimian methodology from The Rules to Suicide Mike Gane 4. Durkheim's altrusitic and fatalistic suicide after the first one hundred years Christie Davies and Mark Neal 5. Suicide, statistics and sociology: assessing Douglas' critique of Durkheim John Varty 6. Reading the conclusion: Suicide , morality and religion W.S.F. Pickering 7. The moral discourse of Durkheim's Suicide William Ramp 8. The fortunes of Durkheim's Suicide : reception and legacy Philippe Besnard 9. The reception of Suicide in Russia Alexander Gofman 10. Marriage and suicide: testing the Durkheimian theory of marital regulation a century later Philippe Besnard 11. Social integration and marital status: a multivariative individual level study of 30,157 suicides K.D. Breault and Augustine J. Kposowa 12. Teaching Durkheim's Suicide : a symposium Christie Davies, Mark Neal, John Varty, Geoffrey Walford, Robert Alun Jones and William Ramp

Durkheim argued that strong social relationships protect individuals from suicide. We posit, however, that strong social relationships also have the potential to increase individuals' vulnerability when they expose people to suicidality. Using three waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we evaluate whether new suicidal thoughts and attempts are in part responses to exposure to role models' suicide attempts, specifically friends and family. We find that role models' suicide attempts do in fact trigger new suicidal thoughts, and in some cases attempts, even after significant controls are introduced. Moreover, we find these effects fade with time, girls are more vulnerable to them than boys, and the relationship to the role model—for teenagers at least—matters. Friends appear to be more salient role models for both boys and girls. Our findings suggest that exposure to suicidal behaviors in significant others may teach individuals new ways to deal with emotional distress, namely by becoming suicidal. This reinforces the idea that the structure—and content—of social networks conditions their role in preventing suicidality. Social ties can be conduits of not just social support, but also antisocial behaviors, like suicidality.

Despite the profound impact Durkheim's Suicide has had on the social sciences, several enduring issues limit the utility of his insights. With this study, we offer a new Durkheimian framework for understanding suicide that addresses these problems. We seek to understand how high levels of integration and regulation may shape suicide in modern societies. We draw on an in-depth, qualitative case study (N = 110) of a cohesive community with a serious adolescent suicide problem to demonstrate the utility of our approach. Our case study illustrates how the lives of adolescents in this highly integrated community are intensely regulated by the local culture, which emphasizes academic achievement. Additionally, the town's cohesive social networks facilitate the spread of information, amplify the visibility of actions and attitudes, and increase the potential for swift sanctions. This combination of cultural and structural factors generates intense emotional reactions to the prospect of failure among adolescents and an unwillingness to seek psychological help for adolescents' mental health problems among both parents and youth. Ultimately, this case illustrates (1) how high levels of integration and regulation within a social group can render individuals vulnerable to suicide and (2) how sociological research can provide meaningful and unique insights into suicide prevention.

Despite its enduring insights, Durkheim's theory of suicide fails to account for a significant set of cases because of its overreliance on structural forces to the detriment of other possible factors. In this paper, we develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the role of culture in vulnerability to suicide. We argue that by focusing on the cultural dynamics of excessive regulation, particularly at the meso level, a more robust sociological model for suicide could be offered that supplements structure-heavy Durkheimian theory. In essence, we argue that the relevance of cultural regulation to suicide rests on the (1) degree to which culture is coherent in sociocultural places, (2) existence of directives related to prescribing or proscribing suicide, (3) degree to which these directives translate into internalized meanings affecting social psychological processes, and (4) degree to which the social space is bounded. We then illustrate how our new theory provides useful insights into three cases of suicide largely neglected within sociology: specifically, suicide clusters in high schools, suicide in the military, and suicides of \"despair\" among middle-aged white men. We conclude with implications for future sociological research on suicide and suicide prevention.

Durkheim's theory of suicide remains one of the quintessential \"classic\" theories in sociology. Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, it has been challenged on theoretical and empirical grounds. Rather than defend Durkheim's theory on its own terms, this paper elaborates his typology of suicide by sketching suicide's socioemotional structure. We integrate social psychological, psychological, and psychiatric advances in emotion research and argue that (1) egoistic, or attachment-based suicides, are driven primarily by sadness/hopelessness; (2) anomic/fatalistic, or regulative suicides, are driven by shame; and (3) mixed-types exist and are useful for developing a more robust and complex multilevel model.

Suicide is a global public health issue, with behavior differing across genders, age groups, places, and sociopolitical settings. Emile Durkheim characterized anomic suicide as occurring when social standards fail, resulting in purposelessness and directionlessness. Young people who are experiencing social issues are in danger, even if they do not voice suicidal ideas. Prevention interventions should target these people by strengthening resilience, minimizing social dysregulation stress, and fostering the development of life skills, coping resources, and social support. Anomic suicide has important psychological and societal implications, emphasizing the importance of fostering social cohesion and assisting persons experiencing purposelessness or a lack of direction in life.

At 77 years old, even after decades of prodigious philanthropy, George Eastman remained one of the wealthiest men in the world. The unmarried founder of Eastman-Kodak lived alone until March 14,1932, when he revised his will in the presence of his lawyers, dismissed them from his study, folded a wet towel over his chest, and shot himself through the heart with his desk drawer revolver.1 His obituary reported, \"A sense of loneliness encompassed George Eastman, after the recent deaths of two of his closest friends, and led him to take his own life.\"2(p5)Living alone, loneliness, and social disconnection have been proposed as suicide risk factors since the dawn of suicidology.3 However, a lack of predeath data on large samples of suicide decedents has prevented us from knowing the demographic characteristics of those at highest increased risk when living alone. A new study by Olfson et al. in this issue of AJPH (p. 1774) contributes evidence of the association between living alone and suicide as it varies across demographic and socioeconomic subgroups. The authors reviewed the 2008 American Community Survey, which includes more than 3 million adults linked to the National Death Index, to identify suicide deaths over the 11 succeeding years. The participants reported on their living situation as well as sociodemographic characteristics, self-reported disability, and housing information, including residential stability and homeownership.Olfson et al. found the annual suicide rates of adults living alone to be almost twice that of adults living with others, confirming previous reports.4,5 The authors went on to identify large differences in the strength ofthat association across specific subgroups. The associations between living alone and subsequent suicide were found to be strongest among wealthy, well-educated, male, White, and older age groups. Membership in some of these groups was previously known to independently increase suicide risk,6 and their strong associations with living alone is tragically reminiscent of George Eastman. However, the recognition of low social integration as a risk factor for suicide dates back most prominently to Emile Durkheim's investigations in the 19th century.

This article discusses the problem of suicide in monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), focusing on their early existence and considering the original contribution of Christianity. The first part presents the main theses of E. Durkheim on altruistic suicide and the concept of honour. This provides an opportunity to examine the problem of suicide in monotheistic religions from a more comprehensive perspective and recognise a certain specificity of suicide that was absent in altrusitic suicide. The analysis of the problem in relation to the concept of honour is also a valuable starting point for complementary psychological theories. The second part of the article is a more detailed discussion of suicide in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The results provide a better understanding of the origins and nature of suicide in monotheistic religions whilst opening up a discussion on the possibility of suicide prevention.

The study of the social dimensions of healthcare (decision-making) behaviour lacks a foundational theory. Using extant studies, this paper argues and demonstrates that their results can be placed on the social manifold that is spanned by the four idealistic poles described by Durkheim’s (On Suicide, 1897) work ‘On Suicide’ and that these poles can therefore be extended to theoretically represent four ideal types (meanings) of healthcare choice: altruistic choice (excessive integration), egoistic choice (absence of integration), fatalistic choice (excessive regulation), and anomic choice (absence of regulation). By using Bearman’s (Sociological Forum 6(3): 501–524, 1991) structural model of suicide, this social manifold is theoretically unfolded by representing all possible tangible (network) structures as a function of integration and regulation, which additionally amplifies and extends Durkheim’s theory. This approach builds upon Pescosolido’s (Advances in Medical Sociology 3(1):161–184, 1991) Network Episode Model and provides opportunity to connect it further to the Social Symbiome.

After the seminal work of Durkheim (1897), many subsequent studies have revealed a decline in suicide rates during wartime. However, their main focus was inter-state wars and whether the same argument holds for civil conflicts within a country is an important unresolved issue in the modern world. Moreover, the findings of the previous studies are not conclusive due to unobserved confounding factors. This study investigated the relationship between civil war and suicide rate through a more rigorous statistical approach using the Sri Lankan civil war as a case study. For this purpose, we employed a linear regression model with district and year fixed effects to estimate a difference-in-difference in the suicide rate between the peacetime and wartime periods as well as the contested and non-contested districts. The results indicate that the suicide rate in the contested districts in the wartime was significantly lower than the baseline by 11.8-14.4 points (95% CI 6.46-17.22 and 7.21-21.54, respectively), which corresponds to a 43-52% decline. The robustness of the possible confounding factors was analyzed and not noted to have so much effect as to alter the interpretation of the results. This finding supports the Durkheimian theory, which places importance on social integration as a determinant of suicide, even for civil conflicts.