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Essay on Emile Durkheim: Suicide
Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in the United States, with 30,535 deaths being ruled suicides in 1997, for a rate of 1.14 suicides per 10,000 people (CDC 1999). Socialists estimate the rate of suicide attempts to be 22 per 10,000 each year in the United States. The difference in these reported annual incidence rates suggests that suicide attempts occur about 20 times as often as completed suicides. Suicidal behavior is the subject of much research in public health and psychiatry.
Much suicidal behavior is due to psychiatric illness, for which an individual's reasoning and behavior is not tractable within the context of economic theory, which requires rationality. However, economic analysis can still illuminate suicidal behavior. The social scientific view of suicide has been dominated by the work of the sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim (1951) proposed two dimensions along which suicide could be categorized. The first dimension pertained to integration into social groups and institutions, and the second was defined by imbalance between means and needs.
In an important respect, this sounds like an economic conceptualization, and although Durkheim meant something broader, he believed that deficits between economic means and needs precipitated suicide.These concepts have dominated sociological work on suicide and have variously been incorporated or extended. For example, demographers have noted the importance of cohort size in shaping prospects, including suicide propensity, throughout the life course. Demographers have suggested that persons born in large cohorts are more likely to be frustrated in their attempts to obtain means to satisfy their needs.
Suicide itself demonstrated that the most complex structural relationships could be plotted by using an empirical indicator such as differential suicide rates. The underlying theme, as in the other works, was the way in which structural relationships affect the level of social integration. Low suicide rates revealed a “healthy” level of integration; high suicide rates revealed pathological states......
