Abstract
The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world. These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide and strategies to prevent it. Unfortunately, despite making significant contributions to the founding of suicidology – through Emile Durkheim’s classic Suicide (1897/1951) – sociology’s role has been less prominent in contemporary efforts to address these tragic trends, though as we will show, sociological theories offer great promise for advancing our understanding of suicide and improving the efficacy of suicide prevention. Here, we review sociological theory and empirical research on suicide. We begin where all sociologists must: with Durkheim. However, we offer a more comprehensive understanding of Durkheim’s insights into suicide than the prior reviews provided by those in other disciplines. In so doing, we reveal the nuance and richness of Durkheim’s insights that have been largely lost in modern suicidology, despite being foundational to all sociological theories of suicide – even those that have moved beyond his model. We proceed to discuss broadly acknowledged limitations to Durkheim’s theory of suicide and review how more recent theoretical efforts have not only addressed those concerns, but have done so by bringing a larger swatch of sociology’s theoretical and empirical toolkit to bare on suicide. Specifically, we review how recent sociological theories of suicide have incorporated insights from social network theories, cultural sociology, sociology of emotions, and sociological social psychology to better theorize how the external social world matters to individual psychological pain and suffering. We conclude by making explicit bridges between sociological and psychological theories of suicide; by noting important limitations in knowledge about suicide – particularly regarding the roles of organizations, inequality, and intersectionality in suicide – that sociology is well situated to help address.
Highlights
The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world (Curtin et al, 2016; Lee et al, 2018; Martini et al, 2019). These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions (Office of the Surgeon General and National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, 2012) and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide (Joiner, 2005; Klonsky and May, 2015; O’Connor and Kirtley, 2018) and strategies to prevent it (Wyman et al, 2010; Wasserman et al, 2015)
Much of the nuance and richness of Durkheim’s insights have been lost in modern suicidology, and yet Durkheim is foundational to understanding sociological theories of suicide, as well as understanding the potential of sociology for suicidology
This set of insights is fundamental to explaining social behavior of all kinds but has largely been neglected in suicidology, even as structural and psychological accounts of suicide have been criticized since the 1960s for ignoring the role cultural meanings play in understanding and explaining variations in suicidality across time, space, and groups/classes of people (Douglas, 1967; Farberow, 1975; Baechler, 1979)
Summary
The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world (Curtin et al, 2016; Lee et al, 2018; Martini et al, 2019). Culture is internalized in our conceptions of the generalized other: people do not just act because they do not want to be sanctioned by others, but rather are motivated to act by the cultural schema, scripts, and frames they are exposed to and internalize and come to take for granted as normative (D’Andrade, 1984; Vaisey, 2009; Lizardo et al, 2016) This set of insights is fundamental to explaining social behavior of all kinds but has largely been neglected in suicidology, even as structural and psychological accounts of suicide have been criticized since the 1960s for ignoring the role cultural meanings play in understanding and explaining variations in suicidality across time, space, and groups/classes of people (Douglas, 1967; Farberow, 1975; Baechler, 1979). Social emotions are a powerful vehicle, when rooted in salient social identities in valued social environments, through which the external social world is translated to internal psychological pain
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