SUICIDE FROM A PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
INTRODUCTION
Suicide is a sad story many people are reluctant to approach. But when somebody nearest to them kills themselves, they feel the compelling guilt of trying to understand the motive behind the death. It is a complex and rather devastating subject. Many who kill themselves can never come back to tell us what happened and why it did. Suicide takes an emotional toll on it's survivors and wreck havoc in the wake of the surrounding victims. What causes suicide is a probing series of many theories, and yet not one definitive answer. The prevention of suicide is also difficult to pinpoint, but only because the intent is unknown. The importance of researching the motives of the suicidal is essential to modern humanity as a whole, because in the era we live in, suicide rates are climbing faster than ever. Understanding the driving force behind suicide is what can help the field of social science to save the conscience mind of many people from self-destruction - and save their lives, and the emotions of their loved ones.
ARTICLE SYNOPSIS
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The Inner Voice that Drives Suicide: Understanding a person in suicidal crisis
By Lisa Firestone, Ph.D in Compassion Matters
Psychology Today
Psychologist Lisa Firestone had come to a conclusion that the main driving factor behind suicide and suicide attempts was an inner voice which disconnected the individual from the real world and from selflessness. The voice centers around the ego and weakens the conscience of the individual, leading them to believe they are unworthy of living and undeserving of human love. She believes that human beings who have suicidal attempts do not do it out of their own accor...
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A Study of Suicide: An overview of the famous work by Emile Durkheim, Ashley Crossman, 2009, http://sociology.about.com/od/Works/a/Suicide.htm, 25/12/2013
Suicide causes, Kevin Caruso, http://www.suicide.org/suicide-causes.html, 25/12/2013
The Media's Influence on Suicide, Deborah Serani, June 2013, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/two-takes-depression/201306/the-medias-influence-suicide, 25/12/2013
Why People Attempt Suicide, http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Suicide/Pages/Causes.aspx, 25/12/2013
Suicide in the U.S: Statistics and Prevention, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-us-statistics-and-prevention/index.shtml, 25/12/2013
Suicide prevention, Stat Canada: Suicide Rates, http://www.suicideprevention.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/StatsCan-SuicideRates_AnOverview-July2012.pdf, 25/12/2013
Emile Durkheim is a French sociologist who investigated suicide and the connection to society using the functionalist perspective. He talks about solidarity being a component of suicide. The less people that an individual has a connection to the more likely they are to consider taking their own life. Belonging to a social group can increase the sense of belonging that people have in their everyday life. Social stratification is a factor of whether someone feels like they belong in a group or not.
In 1897, Emile Durkheim (1997) showed that the suicide – perhaps the most personal of all decisions – could be analysed through the conceptual lenses of sociology.
There are many things which can drive a teen to commit suicide some of them are as simple as making fun of the “fat” kid in class; others can come from the mental images from witnessing a shooting. There are four major issues which contribute to teen suicide such as depression, family problems, risk factors, and teens reactions to there climate. Depression, unfortunately, is one of the biggest factors of today’s teenage suicide problems and some of the reasons for it are from the student’s own peers, “being depressed is triggered by loss or rejection (Joan 59).” Depression can be f...
In a study released by Brown University, their psychology department shed some light on common myths and facts surrounded suicide. These m...
The natural end of every human life is death. Some people, for reasons that have never been fully understood, choose to end their own lives. This is called suicide, which means literally ?self-killing?. For all the uncertainty that has surrounded the phenomenon of suicide, this assessment of the problem is probably as accurate as any. The individual seemingly hopeless conflict with the world, decides to end his or her existence in what amounts to a final assault against a society that can no longer be tolerated. In so doing, the person tries to obtain a final revenge on everything and everyone that has caused their feelings of depression.
This paper is a critical review of the French sociologist Emil Durkheim and his writings on suicide from his book titled ‘Suicide’ written in 1897. Durkheim was seen as a positivist and functionalist. In his book, Durkheim’s goal was to study people’s tendencies towards suicide and to determine the social causes behind them. Suicide, which Durkheim defined as ‘all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result’ (Durkheim, 1987).
Most suicidal people do not want death, they just want the pain to stop, so how can the pain they feel be resolved? The point of my paper is to find out the reasons that people become suicidal and how to prevent it from happening. Even people who have strong thoughts about suicide have wavering thoughts about doing it until the very last moment when they decide whether they want to live or die. Don't ignore even the small references to death or suicide.
Suicide is the eleventh most common cause of death in the United States. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a person takes their own life once every fourteen minutes in the United States (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention [AFSP], 2011). Still, with suicide rates so high, suicide is a taboo topic in our society. Though suicide is intended to end one person’s pain, it causes an immeasurable amount of pain and suffering to loved ones close to the deceased.
Although sociologists like J.D. Douglas would question the reliability of the statistics, due to the coroners decision being final, most sociologists would agree that Durkheim's study into suicide was successful, and indeed many have tried to develop and improve on his theory. Overall, this essay has shown that one type of methodology may not always be suitable for the particular research carried out. Both Interpretative sociology and the Positivist approach equally show that they are valid methods for carrying out research, but like everything, nothing is one hundred percent accurate. Therefore, there is always room for flaw, but in the study of Sociology, there is always room for more ways of obtaining and interpreting data.
A sixteen-year old boy sat in his fourth period class crying because he had just broken up with his girlfriend. As he sat there, he tried to think of a way to ease the pain in his heart of the whole situation. His only conclusion was to try and take his own life. This is an attempt of suicide, which was luckily stopped because of a note that he had given to his girlfriend describing his plans that she, in turn, had given to the Guidance Counselor of the school. The truth is that an attempt of suicide is not always the person’s fault, there are several factors, which are contributed to the cause of suicidal thoughts, or feelings that lead to suicidal attempts, and with various treatment methods these conditions can be controlled not necessarily eliminated.
... the evidence changed in his later works). He has been widely criticised for his use of official statistics, which are open to interpretation and subject to possibly systematic misreporting, and therefore may not represent the true pattern or rates of suicide. It is also argued that he was confused between the distinction between egoism and anomie, and that he failed to substantiate his claims of the existence of altruism and fatalism; this is argued to such an extent that it has even been suggested that there is only one cause of suicide (egoism) that Durkheim could claim to be true. However, whilst acknowledging some of Durkheim’s own contradictions or confusions, some sociologists have gone on to develop and substantiate the ideas that he developed, and there is no denying that his study of suicide is a far-reaching and legacy-building work of substantial value.
“Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain” (I-10). Ending a life is a big step in the wrong direction for most. Suicide is the killing of oneself. Suicide happens every day, and everyday a family’s life is changed. Something needs to be done to raise awareness of that startling fact. Suicide is a much bigger problem than society will admit; the causes, methods, and prevention need to be discussed more openly.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, scientific evidence has shown that almost all people who take their own lives have a diagnosable mental or substance abuse disorder, and the majority have more than one disorder. In other words, the feelings that often lead to suicide are highly treatable. That’s why it is imperative that we better understand the symptoms of the disorders and the behaviors that often accompany thoughts of suicide. With more knowledge, we can often prevent the devastation of losing a loved one.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. The. Suicide and Suicidal Behaviors. Suicide : Medline Plus.
Suicide has become a critical, national problem and the extent of this is mind-boggling. Suicides have been proven to be one of the leading causes of death among college students. According to Webters dictionary “suicide is the act killing oneself on purpose”. It derived from the Latin sui, meaning “self”, and caedere, which means “to kill”. But this is just a definition, because an actual suicide holds different meanings to people such as tragic, shocking, a relief, a cry for help, a shame, heroic, the right choice, punishment, revenge, protest, anger, a mistake, desperate, hurtful and many more. But why do people, like college students who have their entire future ahead of them, simply give up hope and turn their heads away from life and commit suicide. There are several causes of suicide, recent incidents of suicide on college campuses, warning signs from a suicidal. I blame the Constitution and the United States law for not taking any hard initiative on the subject of suicide. I also impose the choice of the media, which is reflecting and portraying suicide towards a wrong direction. However most important questions remain: can the growing epidemic of suicide be solved, what are communities doing about it and what can they do to help?