The topic I chose is suicide, and the way I chose to explore it is by the prospect of Emile Durkheim. According to Durkheim, suicide is "all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act, executed by the victim herself, and she knew she should produce this result." For him each group, society is predisposed to provide a certain contingent of voluntary deaths, and what interests sociology about suicide is the analysis of the whole social process, social factors acting not about isolated individuals, but about the group on the whole of society. Each society has, at each moment of its history, a definite attitude toward suicide. He also found that suicide rates were higher among men than women, higher for those who are single than those who are married, higher for people without children than people with children, higher among soldiers than civilians, and higher at times of peace than in times of war.
Observing that the rate of suicide varied with time and place, Durkheim looked for causes linked to these factors other than emotional stress. He was the first to say that Suicide causes weren’t to be found in individual personalities but social factors based in which group or society that the individual are include. Emile Durkheim also distinguished by three types of suicide: Egoistic, Altruistic and Anomic.
An egoistic suicide happens when people feel totally detached from society, causing the individual does not see more meaning in life, have no more reason to live; an Altruistic suicide happens when there is excessive regulation of individuals by social forces, the individual feels compelled to do it to back off from an unbearable life, it is one in which the ego does not belong, it overlaps with something else that is outside of itself, in one of the groups to which the individual belongs. And the last one is the Anomic Suicide, happens when the disintegrating forces in the society make individuals feel lost or alone, is one which occurs in a situation of social anomie, when there is any rules in the company generating the chaos, causing social normality is not maintained. In a situation of economic crisis, for example, in which there is a complete disruption of the normal rules of society, certain individuals are in an inferior position to that previously occupied. Thus, there is a sudden loss of wealth and power, so that, therefore, the contents of this type of suicide increase.
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