Suicide: the stable rates argument

Extract

The relative stability of many rates of suicide, particularly those of national groups, has for a long time been of interest to sociologists. Durkheim (1952), an early and major writer on suicide, used the fact of relative stability as an argument for the existence of a social dimension to individuals’ actions, even such an apparently personal action as suicide (Cresswell, 1972). Durkheim argued that each nation had a collective tendency towards suicide such that, providing the circumstances of the nation did not change in any essential way, its suicide rate also would not change. His followers, taking this sort of position as given, have related suicide rates to components of social structure or culture of the groups to which the rates refer (e.g. Gibbs & Martin, 1964). Such a procedure implies a relationship, not necessarily a specifically causal one, between suicide and the various aspects of society with which it is correlated. For the procedure to be potentially valid two major conditions must hold good. The first is that the aggregate numbers of ‘suicides’ which are used to compile suicide rates do actually represent the real number of suicidal deaths in a given population over a given period of time. This pre-supposes, of course, that some deaths have defining characteristics in their manner of occurrence which clearly demarcate them as suicide; given this, the problem is one of identification rather than of definition. The second condition is that since suicide rates are compiled from individual deaths, it should be possible to posit, if not actually demon-strate, a relationship between the social or cultural influences which are supposed to generate stable rates of suicide and the individual instances of suicide.