Explain Durkheim's four types of suicides.
Answers
Explanation:
Egoistic suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being integrated in a community. It results from the suicide's sense that s/he has no tether. This absence can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression. Durkheim calls such detachment "excessive individuation". Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and were therefore more likely to commit suicide. Durkheim found that suicide occurred more often among unmarried people, especially unmarried men, whom he found had less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals.
Altruistic suicide is characterized by a sense of being overwhelmed by a group's goals and beliefs. It occurs in societies with high integration, where individual needs are seen as less important than the society's needs as a whole. They thus occur on the opposite integration scale as egoistic suicide. As individual interest would not be considered important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to commit suicide. He described one exception: when the individual is expected to kill her/himself on behalf of society, for example in military service.
Anomic suicide reflects an individual's moral confusion and lack of social direction, which is related to dramatic social and economic upheaval. It is the product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and order on the individual conscience. This is symptomatic of a failure of economic development and division of labour to produce Durkheim's organic solidarity. People do not know where they fit within their societies. Durkheim explains that this is a state of moral disorder where people do not know the limits on their desires and are constantly in a state of disappointment. This can occur when they go through extreme changes in wealth; while this includes economic ruin, it can also include windfall gains – in both cases, previous expectations from life are brushed aside and new expectations are needed before they can judge their new situation in relation to the new limits.
Fatalistic suicide occurs when a person is excessively regulated, when their futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline. It is the opposite of anomic suicide, and occurs in societies so oppressive their inhabitants would rather die than live on. For example, some prisoners might prefer to die than live in a prison with constant abuse and excessive regulation. Unlike the other concepts he developed, Durkheim believed that fatalistic suicide was theoretical and probably did not exist in reality.