Durkheim Anomie Suicide

Durkheim's notions of anomie and suicide

Although today we tend to take an individualistic and biological approach to analyzing the causes of suicide, Emile Durkheim saw suicide as having a sociological cause. Specifically, he believed that the breakdown of social institutions in modern, particularly in urban societies, created a sense of estrangement or anomie within people. People are more isolated in modern life, and as a result they have fewer social and personal moral constraints on their behaviors. There has been a loss of external and thus internal forces of control. Rapid social change and raised expectations more than poverty creates deviant behavior, as peoples' expectations for success are raised, then often dashed.

When people feel detached from others, they are more prone to suicide out of loneliness and because they no longer see suicide as immoral. Durkheim called such suicides egoistic, or suicide called by detachment. A similar cause of suicide, anomic suicide, occurs when people commit suicide because they have lost a sense of a moral structure. Simply put, an egotistic suicide might say -- 'I have no obligation to anyone by myself. I am unhappy, why not kill myself?' An anomic suicide might say, 'the old gods have been shown to be false, so their prohibitions against suicide are also false, why not kill myself since I am unhappy?' ("Individual and society," Sociology at Hewett, excerpted from Coser, 1977:132-136).

These are the most common types of suicide, although Durkheim also gave some other examples of the social causes of suicide, such as altruistic suicide, which is the opposite of anomic suicide -- altruistic suicide is caused by too much social regulation, including as individuals who commit suicide to avoid dishonoring their family, or in extreme cases, because social conventions compel them to commit suicide like the Hindu practice of the ritual suicide of widows or Japanese harikiri, where samurai warriors kill themselves if their lord is dishonored ("Individual and society," Sociology at Hewett, excerpted from Coser, 1977:132-136).

Works Cited

Individual and society." Sociology at Hewett. Excerpted from Coser, 1977:132-136. Retrieved 8 Oct 2007 at http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/CURRIC/soc/durkheim/durkw2.htm