Book of Suicide Notes

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Durkheim presents four varieties of suicide –these all being due to imbalances in a person’s moral or social integration – but the point is that what, to all intents and purposes, looks like the supreme act of individualism is in fact strongly influenced by socially explicable causes. So that, if one were to take the case of the Jews, you might think that a group that was greatly loathed within Europe at the time would have much more reason to commit suicide in greater numbers than those around them who were relatively better liked. That this didn’t prove to be the case was explicable by Durkheim on the basis that Jews protected themselves by forming very strong intra-group bonds – that is, they look out for each other and make sure everyone feels they are looked after and valued. People look out for each other and are looked after in turn. In other cases people had clear roles in life and therefore were much less likely to end their lives, as such an act would abandon that ‘needed’ role within their community. Essentially, when we feel we have a larger role than merely ourselves, we are less likely to want to kill ourselves. Despite all of the protestations of free-market types, we are social animals and happiest within social groups. So, like Plato, Durkheim ends his book in an aporia, in which much delusion is cleared up but we’re not much nearer to a solution. But this analogy is a bit unfair; Plato wrote for the sake of dialectic, while Durkheim wrote to put his sociology into practice. While his data set was flawed and his statistical tools very limited, when it came to deducing arguments and deriving effective hypotheses, Suicide truly is a landmark treatise. PESTIAN: Exactly. Exactly. So that annotation drives how the computer looks at it. And 160 of the survivors volunteered, and they all read the notes three times so we can get a good, what we call inter-rater reliability. And then we gave half of that to the computer and said learn from it, and then we'd keep the other half behind without the answers and ask the computer to learn - or tell us what the answer should be. positivist sociology is an abyss of statistical correlational mania, the reification of said regularities into prescriptions about "normality", and a justification for present state of social control and repression. A seeming taking for granted of the present state of things. Following the previous bullet, Durkheim's categorization of suicide into various types. The types he describes may be debatable, but the recognition that all suicides are not the same is important.

Suicide Notes | Psychology Today Suicide Notes | Psychology Today

PESTIAN: Hopefully we'll start enrolling in early fall and it'll last - enrollment will be about a year to 18 months, and then about a year worth of analysis before we can kind of get to that stage. So it's a couple years away. PESTIAN: But we'll also do the video with a camera and the audio with audio recording, and genetics are just a little toothbrush-like thing, called a buccal swab that you scrape against your cheek and then send off to be analyzed. Rejecting psychopathic state. It would be an almost knee-jerk reflex to blame insanity as one of the causes of suicide. But suicide as an act from specific and voluntary intention, according to Durkheim, is almost impossible among the insane. These are absent in the manic in his multiplicity of shifting thoughts, the obsessive under his thraldom and fixity, the melancholic in the chronicity and lastly the impulsive in the automaticity of his thoughts; all are devoid of real intent to truly die. In short, the suicidal state felt by the insane is devoid of any real or concrete motive, as different as illusions and hallucinations to normal perceptions. By saying this is not at all discounting the fact that the insane really felt the pangs of his state, but to emphasise on its totally unrelatedness to external conditions. From the racial factor, he pointed out that if suicide does indeed rise from insanity, then why would the Jews with a higher number of the insane has one of the lowest rate for suicide? And we took those notes and we shuffled them all up, and then we asked about 60 mental health professionals to tell us which ones were real and which ones were simulated. And mental health professionals were good as a flip of a coin, about 50 percent of the time. Now, that's a hard task, don't get me wrong. Going in I expected reading Durkheim in the 21rst century to be a purely historic endeavour, examining up close the beginnings of the social sciences but not really learning anything. And there's a large chunk of the book that's like that, including uncomfortable sections about "lower races" and the natural inclinations of women. But there's also a lot in here that spoke to questions I'd been considering later, about the intersection of the individual and society and the difficulty of trying to balance the two. Durkheim's thesis is that suicide occurs when there isn't a proper balance between these two elements, and the individual is either entirely cut off from society or completely absorbed by it. What's interesting is that the idea of suicide he debunks -- as a form of individual madness unconnected with social pressures -- is still the prevalent one today. I think this shows how the rise of psychiatry, for all the good its done, has created an idea of individualism that ultimately steers people away from questioning society or even being aware of it.

Given how often the genuine suicides admonished the living, the researchers surmised that the suicidal person was trying to exercise one last bit of power in the world, as if his death added weight to his requests and requirements.

Suicide note - Wikipedia Suicide note - Wikipedia

This is a seriously interesting book. It is an early classic of sociology (and of sociological thinking) and so, as such, it is one of those books you are supposed to at least know-of, if not to have actually read. And, despite it being rather long, it is surprisingly easy to read. Suicide: a sociological study, by Durkheim, and "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", by Marx. (Note the absence of any of Weber's works. Groundbreaking he may be, but a gifted writer he is not).Tomorrow, we'll have a look ahead - another one - this time with our own Robert Krulwich. Join us for that. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Religion protects against suicide, but not so much by prohibition as by depriving a person of mental freedom (for example, suicide among Catholics is much less than among Protestants); Es un libro dificil de leer, trabajoso pero que vale la pena. Es bastanta agradable la forma en que clasifica una cuestion tan desagradable como el suicidio. Te hace sentirlo más humano. Since the book was intended to be a manual, the author did not spend too much space on discussing the reasons and philosophy behind suicide, although he does rhetorically pose the question "Why must one live?". Wataru simply lays out the methods of suicide one by one and then analyzes each of them in detail. Of the whole Marx, Weber, Durkheim trifecta, these are my favorites to read (and this is about pleasure, not about theoretical or ideological paradigms):

Suicide Note Quotes (39 quotes) - Goodreads Suicide Note Quotes (39 quotes) - Goodreads

There are lines of inference I disagree with, and some which are contextually outdated (related to marriage), but in the whole these interpretations still seem relevant. There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that” Durkheim focuses on the ‘non-contractual elements in contract’ – trust, integrity and moral obligations – as the prime source of social cohesion in economic relations. Elementary sociology but ignored by, or unknown to economists, for whom Durkheim should be compulsory reading. Feral bankers are a far greater threat to civil peace than feral children.…Seasonal variations (Summer stats always higher) and Christian denomination (Catholics almost always lower) are only nonmarital factors which seemed potential correlates. Dr. John Pestian leads the research team. He's a pediatrician and director of computational medicine at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and joins us now from member station WGCU in Cincinnati. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The NPR member station in Cincinnati was misidentified. It is WGUC.] And good of you to join us today on TALK OF THE NATION. Durkheim's insistence that individual qualities are not really relevant when discussing determining factors of suicide, because suicide is determined by social causes.