Anomic Suicide

SMHAI Home About Suicide About Mental Health Suicide Prevention Suicide Survivors Suicide Attempters Self-Injury - Cutters Crisis Donate Contact

Mental Health Professionals

Speakers & Presentations

SMHAI Library

Online Support & Resources

Memorials, Remebrances & Celebrations Of Life

Healing Music

Suggested Reading - Survivors

Upcoming Events

Dr. Roerich's Welcome

Ann Gay's Welcome

Legal & About SMHAI

Privacy Policy

Copyright Notice

Awards Honoring SMHAI

SMHAI Awards Program

Shop for everyday items by clicking the below logo. A portion of your purchase supports SMHAI.

SMHAI is listed under the
"Mental Illness" category.

We comply with the HONcode standard for health trust worthy information:
verify here.

Anomic Suicide

Egoistic and anomic suicide, as we have seen, are the respective consequences of the individual's insufficient or excessive integration within the society to which he belongs. But quite aside from integrating its members, a society must control and regulate their beliefs and behavior as well; and Durkheim insisted that there is a relation between a society's suicide rate and the way it performs this important regulative function.

Industrial and financial crises, for example, increase the suicide rate, a fact commonly attributed to the decline of economic well-being these crises produce. But the same increase in the suicide rate, Durkheim observed, is produced by crisis resulting in economic prosperity; "Every disturbance of equilibrium," he insisted, "even though it achieved greater comfort and a heightening of general vitality, is an impulse to voluntary death."29 But how can this be the case? How can something generally understood to improve a man's life serve to detach him from it?

No living being, Durkheim began, can be happy unless its needs are sufficiently proportioned to its means; for if its needs surpass its capacity to satisfy them, the result can only be friction, pain, lack of productivity, and a general weakening of the impulse to live. In an animal, of course, the desired equilibrium between needs and means is established and maintained by physical nature -- the animal cannot imagine ends other than those implicit within its own physiology, and these are ordinarily satisfied by its purely material environment.

Human needs, however, are not limited to the body alone; indeed, "beyond the indispensable minimum which satisfies nature when instinctive, a more awakened reflection suggests better conditions, seemingly desirable ends craving fulfillment."30 But the aspirations suggested by such reflections are inherently unlimited there is nothing in man's individual psychology or physiology which would require them to cease at one point rather than another. Unlimited desires are, by definition, insatiable, and insatiability is a sure source of human misery: "To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable," Durkheim concluded, "is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness."31

For human beings to be happy, therefore, their individual needs and aspirations must be constrained; and since these needs and aspirations are the products of a reflective social consciousness, the purely internal, physiological constraints enjoyed by animals are insufficient to this purpose. This regulatory function must thus be performed by an external, moral agency superior to the individual -- in other words, by society. And since the constraints thus applied are borne unequally by a society's members, the result is a "functional" theory of stratification resembling that of Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore32 -- society determines the respective value of different social services, the relative reward allocated to each, and the consequent degree of comfort appropriate to the average worker in each occupation.

This classically conservative doctrine is tempered by two qualifications. First, the scale of services and rewards is not immutable, but rather varies with the amount of collective revenue and the changing moral ideas of the society itself; and second, the system must secure some degree of legitimacy -- both the hierarchy of functions and the distribution of these functions among the population must be considered "just" by those subject to it. These caveats entered, however, Durkheim insisted that human happiness can be achieved only through the acceptance of moral (that is, social) constraints.

But what has this to do with suicide? Briefly, when society is disturbed by some crisis, its "scale" is altered and its members are "reclassified"33 accordingly; in the ensuing period of dis-equilibrium, society is temporarily incapable of exercising its regulative function, and the lack of constraints imposed on human aspirations makes happiness impossible. This explains why periods of economic disaster, like those of sudden prosperity, are accompanied by an increase the number of suicides, and also why countries long immersed in poverty have enjoyed a relative immunity to self-inflicted death.

Durkheim used the term anomie to describe this temporary condition of social deregulation, and anomic suicide to describe the resulting type of self-inflicted death; but in one sphere of life, he added, anomie is not a temporary disruption but rather a chrome state. This is the sphere of trade and industry, where the traditional sources of societal regulation -- religion, government, and occupational groups -- have all failed to exercise moral constraints on an increasingly unregulated capitalist economy.

Religion, which once consoled the poor and at least partially restricted the material ambitions of the rich, has simply lost most of its power. Government, which once restrained and subordinated economic functions, is now their servant, thus, the orthodox economist would reduce government to a guarantor of individual contracts, while the extreme socialist would make it the "collective bookkeeper" -- and neither would grant it the power to subordinate other social agencies and unite them toward one common aim.

Even occupational groups, which once regulated salaries, fixed the price of products and production, and indirectly fixed the average level of income on which needs were based, has been made impotent by the growth of industry and the indefinite expansion of the market. In trade and industry, therefore, "the state of crisis and anomy is constant and, so to speak, normal. From top to bottom of the ladder greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it," Durkheim concludes, "since its goal is far beyond all it can attain."34 And thus the industrial and commercial occupations are among those which furnish the greatest numbers of suicides.

Quite aside from such economic anomie, however, is that domestic anomie which afflicts widows and widowers as well as those who have experienced separation and divorce.35 The association of the latter with an increased tendency to suicide had already been observed,36 but had been attributed to marital selection -- divorced couples are more apt to have been recruited from individuals with psychological flaws, who are also more apt to commit suicide.

Characteristically, Durkheim rejected such individual, psychological "explanations" for both suicide and divorce arguing instead that we should focus on the intrinsic nature of marriage and divorce themselves.

Marriage, Durkheim explained, ought to be understood as the social regulation not only of physical instinct, but also of those aesthetic and moral feelings which have become complicated with sexual desire over the course of evolution. Precisely because these new aesthetic and moral inclinations have become increasingly independent of organic necessities, the moral regulation of monogamic marriage has become necessary: "For by forcing a man to attach himself forever to the same woman," Durkheim observed, "it assigns a strictly definite object to the need for love, and closes the horizon."37 Divorce would then be understood as a weakening of this matrimonial regulation, and wherever law and custom permit its "excessive" practices the relative immunity to self-inflicted death thus guaranteed is undermined, and suicides increase.

As we have already seen, however, the immunity guaranteed by marriage alone is enjoyed only by the husband, both partners participating only in the immunity provided by the larger domestic society; similarly, it is husbands rather than wives who are afflicted with increased suicide rates where divorces are "excessive." Why don't divorce rates affect the wife?

Durkheim's quintessentially Victorian answer was that the mental life of women -- and thus the "mental character" of their sexual needs -- is less developed than that of men; and since their sexual needs are thus more closely related to those of their organism, these needs find an efficient restraint in physiology alone, without the additional, external regulation of that monogamic matrimony required by males.

This was an observation however, from which Durkheim derived an un-Victorian inference: since monogamic matrimony provides no suicidal immunity to the wife, it is a gratuitous form of social discipline which she suffers without the slightest compensatory advantage. The traditional view of marriage -- that its purpose is to protect the woman from masculine caprice, and to impose a sacrifice of polygamous instincts upon the man -- is thus clearly false; on the contrary, it is the woman who makes the sacrifices, receiving little or nothing in return.38

To this "etiological" classification of suicides by their causes, Durkheim added a "morphological" classification according to their characteristic effects or manifestations. Suicides like that of Lamartine's Raphael, for example, committed out of a morbid mood of melancholia -- were considered the consequence and expression of egoistic suicide, as were the more cheerfully indifferent "Epicurean" suicides of those who, no longer able to experience the pleasures of life, see no reason to prolong it. Altruistic suicide, as we have already seen, is characterized by the serene conviction that one is performing one's duty, or a passionate outburst of faith and enthusiasm; while anomic suicide, though equally passionate, expresses a mood of anger and disappointment at aspirations unfulfilled.

Just as there are different types of suicide distinguishable by their causes, therefore, there are different species of moods or dispositions through which these types are expressed. In actual experience, however, these types and species are not found in their pure, isolated state; on the contrary, different causes may simultaneously afflict the same individuals, giving rise to composite modes of suicidal expression.

Egoism and anomie, for example, have a special "affinity" for one another -- the socially detached egoist is often unregulated as well (though usually introverted, dispassionate, and lacking in those aspirations which lead to frustration), while the unregulated victim of anomie is frequently a poorly integrated egoist (though his boundless aspirations typically prevent any excessive introversion).

Similarly, anomie may be con joined with altruism -- the exasperated infatuation produced by anomie may coincide with the courageous, dutiful resolution of the altruist. Even egoism and altruism, contraries though they are, may combine in certain situations -- within a society undergoing disintegration, groups of individuals may construct some ideal out of whole cloth, devoting themselves to it to precisely the extent that they become detached from all else.

Finally, Durkheim found no relation whatsoever between the type of suicide and the nature of the suicidal acts by which death is achieved. Admittedly, there is a correlation between particular societies and the popularity of certain suicidal acts within them, indicating that the choice of suicidal means is determined by social causes. But the causes which lend one to commit suicide in a particular ways Durkheim insisted are quite different from those which lead one to commit suicide in the first place; the customs and traditions of a particular society place some instruments of death rather than others at one's disposal, and attach differing degrees of dignity even to the various means thus made available. While both are dependent on social causes, therefore, the mode of suicidal act and the nature of suicide itself are unrelated.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes:

29. 1897b: 246. 30. 1897b: 247. This argument -- that desires are simple and few in the "state of nature," but multiply with advancing civilization -- is one that we (and presumably Durkheim) owe to Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). 31. 1897b: 247-8. 32. Cf. Davis and Moore. "Some Principles of Stratification", American Sociological Review, Vol. X (April, 1945). pp. 242-249. 33. Durkheim used the term "repressive anomy" to describe the condition produced by a reclassification downward in the social hierarchy, and "progressive anomy" to describe its upward counterpart (cf. 1897b: 285). 34. 1897b: 256. 35. Cf. Book Two, Chapter 3. 36. Cf. the study of Bertillon (September. 1882), summarized by Durkheim on p. 260. 37. 1897b: 270. 38. 1897b: 275-6.

http://www.relst.uiuc.edu/durkheim/Summaries/suicide.html

Back To The Top