Suicide as a Social Phenomenon
A consequence of our inevitable Death coupled with our faculty for self-awareness and the complicated relationship between our internal and external realities, is the occurrence of suicide. Precise definitions of suicide can be difficult and differ in each society as can gathering statistics. Generally, suicide is believed to be the act of intentionally ending ones own life and is an act that involves no other person. During 2013, in the UK, there were 6,708 suicides according to the charity Samaritans. But of course, there is no counting the amount of attempted suicides. Nor is it possible to have exact numbers of suicides in the UK for a myriad of reasons, such as the amount of deaths registered as ‘undetermined intent’ or something else due to insufficient evidence or stigma, but were actually suicide whilst there are also different definitions for it within the United Kingdom. The suicide rate in 2015 saw a slight drop from the numbers in 2013, which had been the highest number of deaths since 2001, but lower than the peak seen in the 1980s. It occurs most commonly among men aged between 45 and 49 and this group is at it’s highest since 1981.
Suicide is the tip of a societal iceberg of despair. It is a signal of how difficult so many people’s lives are and how much suffering we endure. The causes of suicide are generally thought to be due to an individual’s physical or mental circumstances. For example: injury, depression, bereavement, relationship breakdown, financial difficulty, perception of social failure or a lack of self worth. Occasionally a person can have an inherent desire or inclination to not exist independent of their circumstances and sometimes they may be clinically insane, although this is rarely a cause for committing suicide.
But a human being is not just their individuality and to understand what drives some of us to this ultimate act we must also understand the social context in which they have lived. The nineteenth century French Sociologist, Emilie Durkheim, created the first detailed account of Suicide in a modern capitalist society, (On Suicide, 1897). He spoke about how the private events often taken to be the immediate causes of suicide have no more effect than what the victim gives to them, but this effect is often reflected in the moral state of their society. He found that the more developed the country was, the more fragmented it’s society and so the more individualised it became meaning the more personal failure was felt, leading more well educated and wealthy individuals to feel victimised by the misfortunes of life.
At base, the nineteenth century picture is little different to the twenty-first. The rise of capitalist individualism has brought many material benefits to a small percentage of the world’s population; for example, technology, communication, transport and medicine. Yet it has come with the re-affirmed story that feeds our ego: we deserve our rewards if we succeed and our poverty if we fail. But social failure for the majority is inevitable when life is transitory, when it is so unequal and so much of it is outside of our control. Furthermore, developed societies have become more secularised and as a consequence the antidote to this story has disappeared from our lives. It may have been wrong for religion to dominate and accrue vast wealth through oppression and war, or be built upon a belief that cannot be proved beyond reasonable doubt, but it does not negate the many human needs it helped fulfil, not least, the comfort and meaning in the face of social humiliation, failure, rejection and the personal suffering of everyday life in an otherwise meaningless world. Durkheim recognised a void had been left by religion that still needs to be filled today.
Durkheim’s study showed us that we must understand suicide within the social context. He wrote how every human society has a pronounced inclination for suicide, each social group has a collective tendency towards suicide which is peculiar to it and that it is from this group that individual tendencies derive: ‘It is the tendencies of the collective group which penetrates the mind of the individual influencing their decision to kill themselves.’
Many people who are suicidal turn to death not because they want to die as such, but because they want to be rid of their pain. Mental illness, particularly anxiety, depression and the health impacts of stress are a leading issue in the UK today caused by increasing work hours, divorce, reduction in living standards and the discontent fostered by all forms of media. This contributes to many individual reasons for committing or attempting suicide. The social context of our identity and economy is fundamental. We must re-think our understanding to see suicide as a social phenomenon. As we should our destructive tendency to assign it as selfish so that the blame is put on the person committing the action, rather than the complicated forces around and within them that caused the action.
