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This book explores the depiction of suicide in American youth films from 1900 to 2019. Anchored in Sociology, this multidisciplinary study investigates the causes and consequences of suicide and uncovers the socio-cultural context for the development of youth, film, and suicide. While such cinematic portrayals seem to privilege external explanations of suicide versus internal or psychological ones, overall they are neither rich nor sensitive. Most are simplistic, limited or at the very least unbalanced. At times, they are flatly controversial. In light of this overall problematic depiction of suicide, this book offers a proactive approach to empower young audiences—a media literacy strategy to embrace while watching these films.

The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide's social causes. People kill themselves because of breakups and divorces, because of lost jobs and ruined finances, because of public humiliations and the threat of arrest. While some psychological approaches address external stressors, this comprehensive study is the first to systematically examine suicide as a social behavior with social catalysts.Drawing on Donald Black's theories of conflict management and pure sociology, Suicide presents a new theory of the social conditions that compel an aggrieved person to turn to self-destruction. Interpersonal conflict plays a central but underappreciated role in the incidence of suicide. Examining a wide range of cross-cultural cases, Jason Manning argues that suicide arises from increased inequality and decreasing intimacy, and that conflicts are more likely to become suicidal when they occur in a context of social inferiority. As suicide rates continue to rise around the world, this timely new theory can help clinicians, scholars, and members of the general public to explain and predict patterns of self-destructive behavior.

This unique book explores suicide as more than just a manner of death. It challenges the myths, beliefs, dogma, and customs of suicide from the earliest theories. It offers fresh insights into dark spaces. World-wide, suicide deaths are three times greater than homicides, and are increasing. Current approaches to stem this ‘epidemic'are not working, or have very limited success. Mental health interventions, theories about a suicide or a depression gene, and the ever-increasing dispensing of antidepressants have not lessened the stark statistics. The authors attempt to understand the soul of the suicide — addressing the social, economic, political, historical, geographic, and cultural contexts in which suicide occurs. The social order is indelibly connected to settings, places, circumstances, relationships, occupations, climate, and milieus. Most of the 36 diverse categories of self-motivated deaths defy a ‘one-size-fits-all'approach. Recognising contexts and looking outside the confines that have imprisoned thinking about suicide, could well be more effective in alleviating or mitigating suicide than years searching for a possible vaccination against such death.The book is an appeal to move beyond the medical model of suicide. Written in a very accessible style, it is of interest to social scientists, philosophers, professionals and researchers in public health, medical and behavioural sciences, and lay persons alike.A critical, stimulating and moral tale of suicide that provides a new look -–Michael J. Kral, PhD, School of Social Work, Wayne State University, Michigan, USA … a major breakthrough and a step in the right direction in addressing the problem of suicide-–Said Shahtahmasebi, PhD, Research Director, the Good Life Research Centre Trust, Christchurch, New Zealand … informed understanding of suicide's multiplicity and historical instability – Jennifer White, PhD, School of Youth and Child Care, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

This book explores the role of culture in explaining suicidal behavior. Explanations based on the genes and physiology of individuals, and theories based on psychological variables have difficulty explaining the suicide rate of societies, as well as the occurrence of suicide in individuals. This book illustrates the strong role of culture in determining the suicide rate of societies by looking at the role of the major religion of a society, in particular, Islam, as well as national differences in suicide rates, and the variation of suicide rates within a nation (for example, over the states of the USA). Descriptions of suicidal behavior in some groups are provided, including African American slaves in the 1700s and 1800s, Siberian indigenous peoples, and the Roma. Cultural scripts for suicide are described, such as seppuku, sati, and victim-precipitated homicide, and types of suicide in which the staging of the suicidal act is determined by the culture. Finally, it is argued that, not only does culture have an impact on the suicide rate of a society, but also that culture is the primary determinant of the staging of the suicidal act, that is, the location chosen for suicide (for example, at home versus away from home), the method chosen for suicide, the clothes worn, the motive for the suicidal act, and other choices that the would-be suicide has to make.

Every suicide is an individual tragedy whose origins challenge our mental capacity. Suicide is a global phenomenon. Each year there are over 800,000 reported suicides worldwide and that is expected to increase to over 1.5 million by 2020. More people attempt suicide than die from suicide. Family-member survivors and communities are left with many unanswered questions, not understanding why the person chose to commit suicide. Persons responding to suicide and suicide attempts are very often not prepared for what they encounter and this exacerbates the problem. This book looks at the struggles of a high-risk people group and presents interventions and postventions proffered in a consultation forum.

Emile Durkheim's 1897 On Suicide is widely recognized as one of the foundational classic texts of sociology. It is also one that shows the degree to which strong interpretative skills can often provide the bedrock for high-level analysis. Durkheim's aim was to analyse the nature of suicide in the context of society itself – examining it not just as an individual decision, but one in which different social factors played important roles. In order to do this, it was vital that he both define and classify suicide into subtypes – kinds of suicide with different causal factors at play. From his research, Durkheim identifed four broad types of suicide: egoistic (from a sense of not-belonging), altruistic (from a sense that group goals far outweigh individual well-being), anomic (from lack of moral or social direction), and fatalistic (in response to excessive discipline or oppression). These definitions opened the way for Durkheim to pursue a close social analysis examining how each type related to different social contexts. While his study is in certain ways dated, it remains classic precisely because it helped define the methodology of sociology itself – in which interpretative skills remain central.

Japan's suicide phenomenon has fascinated both the media and academics, although many questions and paradoxes embedded in the debate on suicide have remained unaddressed in the existing literature, including the assumption that Japan is a'Suicide Nation'. This tendency causes common misconceptions about the suicide phenomenon and its features.Aiming to redress the situation, this book explores how the idea of suicide in Japan was shaped, reinterpreted and reinvented from the 1900s to the 1980s. Providing a timely contribution to the underexplored history of suicide, it also adds to the current heated debates on the contemporary way we organize our thoughts on life and death, health and wealth, on the value of the individual, and on gender. The book explores the genealogy and development of modern suicide in Japan by examining the ways in which beliefs about the nation's character, historical views of suicide, and the cultural legitimation of voluntary death acted to influence even the scientific conceptualization of suicide in Japan. It thus unveils the way in which the language on suicide was transformed throughout the century according to the fluctuating relationship between suicide and the discourse on national identity, and pathological and cultural narratives. In doing so, it proposes a new path to understanding the norms and mechanisms of the process of the conceptualization of suicide itself.Filling in a critical gap in three particular fields of historical study: the history of suicide, the history of death, and the cultural history of twentieth century Japan, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Japanese History.

Suicide and Agency offers an original and timely challenge to existing ways of understanding suicide. Through the use of rich and detailed case studies, the authors assembled in this volume explore how interplay of self-harm, suicide, personhood and agency varies markedly across site (Greenland, Siberia, India, Palestine and Mexico) and setting (self-run leprosy colony, suicide bomb attack, cash-crop farming, middle-class mothering). Rather than starting from a set definition of suicide, they empirically engage suicide fields-the wider domains of practices and of sense making, out of which realized, imaginary, or disputed suicides emerge. By drawing on ethnographic methods and approaches, a new comparative angle to understanding suicide beyond mainstream Western bio-medical and classical sociological conceptions of the act as an individual or social pathology is opened up. The book explores a number of ontological assumptions about the role of free will, power, good and evil, personhood, and intentionality in both popular and expert explanations of suicide. Suicide and Agency offers a substantial and ground-breaking contribution to the emerging field of the anthropology of suicide. It will appeal to a range of scholars and students, including those in anthropology, sociology, social psychology, cultural studies, suicidology, and social studies of death and dying.

Critical Suicidology introduces alternative approaches to suicide prevention, approaches that don't pathologize inequality and distress but rather take into consideration the social, political, and cultural contexts of people's lives.

What drives a person to take his or her own life? Why would an individual be willing to strap a bomb to himself and walk into a crowded marketplace, blowing himself up at the same time as he kills and maims the people around him? Does suicide or ‘voluntary death'have the same meaning today as it had in earlier centuries, and does it have the same significance in China, India and the Middle East as it has in the West? How should we understand this distressing, often puzzling phenomenon and how can we explain its patterns and variations over time?In this wide-ranging comparative study, Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a vast body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists, Barbagli shows that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to considering the two causes that were highlighted by the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim – namely, social integration and regulation. Barbagli proposes a new account of suicide that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for whom and against whom individuals take their lives.This new study of suicide sheds fresh light on the cultural differences between East and West and greatly increases our understanding of an often-misunderstood act. It will be the definitive history of suicide for many years to come.

Drawing on diverse theoretical and textual sources, The Gender of Suicide presents a critical study of the ways in which contemporary society understands suicide, exploring suicide across a range of key expert bodies of knowledge. With attention to Durkheim's founding study of suicide, as well as discourses within sociology, law, medicine, psy-knowledge and newsprint media, this book demonstrates that suicide cannot be understood without understanding how gender shapes it, and without giving explicit attention to the manner in which prevailing claims privilege some interpretations and experiences of suicide above others. Revealing the masculine and masculinist terms in which our current knowledge of suicide is constructed, The Gender of Suicide, explores the relationship between our grasp of suicide and problematic ideas connected to the body, agency, violence, race and sexuality. As such, it will appeal to sociologists and social theorists, as well as scholars of cultural studies, philosophy, law and psychology.

Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.

Dai dati segnalati dall'OMS negli ultimi anni è emerso che il suicidio costituisce oggi un grave problema di sanità pubblica: nei Paesi occidentali rappresenta infatti la seconda-terza causa di morte nei giovani e l'ottava-nona nei soggetti anziani. Nel 2000 circa un milione di individui si è tolto la vita, mentre circa 15 milioni di persone hanno tentato il suicidio. Ciò significa, in media, una morte per suicidio ogni 40 secondi e un tentativo di suicidio ogni 3 secondi. Il suicidio è un atto complesso, non ascrivibile a una sola causa. Secondo i più recenti studi, infatti, le motivazioni alla base di questo fenomeno derivano da un'interazione di fattori biologici e ambientali, che si intrecciano con ulteriori implicazioni psicologiche, sociali e culturali. Questo volume analizza la varietà dei fenomeni autolesivi (vero e proprio suicidio, tentato suicidio, altre forme di comportamento anticonservativo) e individua le categorie di soggetti più interessate, con particolare attenzione agli adolescenti e alle popolazioni speciali (carcerati, forze dell'ordine), descrivendo fattori di rischio e di protezione e delineando strategie di trattamento e prevenzione. Pensato in particolare per medici, psicologi, studenti universitari di ogni ordine e grado, nonché per i diversi operatori sanitari e psicosociali, questo libro si rivolge anche a tutti coloro che sono interessati ai quegli aspetti della società (condizione economica, religiosità, crisi, tossicodipendenza) chiamati in causa da questa condizione estrema di disagio.

This is the fifth and final volume in a series of books examining the problem of suicide around the world and how suicide can be prevented. There are many groups of individuals that have been the focus of special interest. Part One of this volume presents current research and interventions for these groups, including those who have chronic medical illnesses, who are homeless and who are very young. Suicide in the workplace and in jails and prisons presents particular problems for mental health professionals, and the problems involved in preventing suicide in these situations are discussed. Part Two presents discussions of issues that have been of particular concern in recent years, such as whether antidepressants precipitate suicidal behavior in some people as well as preventing it in others and the complex issues involved in physician-assisted suicide.

The aging of populations and the high prevalence of chronic diseases are risk factors for suicide, as well as the increasing prevalence of several mental disorders. The continuing growth of several other risk factors for suicide makes it possible to predict an increase in suicide rates worldwide unless resolute action is undertaken to prevent suicidal behavior. A major problem in that respect is that, in many countries, suicide is not seen as a major public health problem despite its frequency and the severity of its consequences. A textbook bringing together current knowledge about suicide, its causes and its prevention is a precious tool for public health efforts and for clinicians’ daily work and provides useful information from psychological, sociological and cultural perspectives which will help health professionals and provide them with data that they can use in developing proposals for action.

Sociologists have debated suicide since the early days of the discipline. This book assesses that body of work and breaks new ground through a qualitatively-driven, mixed method'sociological autopsy'ofone hundredsuicides that explores what can be known about suicidal lives.

'Current medical and psychological wisdom holds that all (Ernst et al.., 2004), or almost all (Bertolote et al., 2004) those who complete suicide, do so in response to a mental disorder. This book is opposed to that notion... A'predicament model of suicide'is presented which allows the incorporation into a single model, of the majority of what is known about the etiology of suicide. The essential element is that suicide results when the individual is in a'predicament'. A unique notion here is that mental disorder (or more precisely, the distress experienced as a result of a mental disorder) can be usefully cast as a form of (internal) predicament. Mental disorder predicament is construed as comparable to the distress which can result from environmental factors. A combination of these two is, of course, common. The term'predicament model'has been used to draw attention to the importance of the stimulus. This is not to deny the importance of individual vulnerability. Individual vulnerability, in the medical model context, depends on genetics and life experiences. Individual vulnerability, in the sociological context, is also important, and refers to individuals who are insufficiently integrated into, or regulated by, society. The sociology of suicide is celebrated. The mistaken idea that Durkheim found no place of psychopathology in suicide is laid to rest. The stories of the suicides of influential individuals have been transmitted through painting, sculpture, literature and music such that western culture now has a tradition of suicide as an escape option when trapped in a predicament. Suicide rates are discussed.'A typology of suicide'is presented, based in the notion of predicaments and the observations of others. Four types of suicide are offered, into which all suicide can be categorized.'Medicalization'is the process by which non-medical problems are re-classified as medical problems. By this process normal distress and disappointment have become synonymous with mood disorder. It is agued here, that suicide has also become medicalized, making prevention the responsibility of health professions (who have relatively little to offer in the absence of mental disorder). Further, this approach leaves without a role, the community and politicians, who have the ability to modify the values and behavior of society. A'pathway model of suicide'is presented in which distress is the central element.'--Page ii-iii.

In India about 123,000 people take their own lives each year, the second highest total in the world. There is a suicide death in India almost every 4 minutes, and it is the leading cause of death for rural Indians especially women in early adulthood. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of suicide in India based on original research as well as existing studies, and looks at the issue in an international, sociological and historical context.The author looks at the reliability of suicide data in India, and goes on to discuss various factors relating to suicide, including age, gender, education and marriage. Among its findings, the book exposes a hidden youth suicide ‘crisis'in India which is argued to be far more serious than the better known crisis of farmer suicides. The book dispels many myths that are commonly associated with suicide, and highlights a neglected public health problem. Suicide in the region of Pondicherry is looked at in detail, as well as in the Indian Diaspora. This book is a useful contribution to South Asian Studies, as well as studies in Mental Health and Sociology.

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with more than one million fatalities each year. During the post-war period, the rate of completed suicides has risen dramatically, especially among young men and Aboriginal peoples living in the Western world. While this has naturally led to growing concern amongst health care practitioners and policy experts, relatively little is known about the history of attempted and completed suicide. Histories of Suicide is the first book to examine the history of suicide in diverse national contexts, including Japan, Scotland, Australia, Soviet Russia, Peru, United States, France, South Africa, and Canada, to reveal the different social, political, economic, and cultural factors that inform our understanding of suicide. This interdisciplinary collection of essays assembles historians, health economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, who examine the history of suicide from a variety of approaches to provide crucial insight into how suicide differs across nations, cultures, and time periods. Focusing on developments from the eighteenth century to the present, the contributors examine vitally important topics such as the medicalization of suicide, representations of mental illness, psychiatric disputes, and the frequency of suicide amongst soldiers. An illuminating volume of studies, Histories of Suicide is a fascinating examination of the phenomenon of self-destruction throughout different historical periods and nations.

In early twentieth-century Russia, suicide became a public act and a social phenomenon of exceptional scale, a disquieting emblem of Russia's encounter with modernity. This book draws on an extensive range of sources, from judicial records to the popular press, to examine the forms, meanings, and regulation of suicide from the seventeenth century to 1914, placing developments into a pan-European context. It argues against narratives of secularization that read the history of suicide as a trajectory from sin to insanity, crime to social problem, and instead focuses upon the cultural politics of self-destruction. Suicide - the act, the body, the socio-medical problem - became the site on which diverse authorities were established and contested, not just the priest or the doctor but also the sovereign, the public, and the individual. This panoramic history of modern Russia, told through the prism of suicide, rethinks the interaction between cultural forms, individual agency, and systems of governance.

There would be no need for sociology if everyone understood the social frameworks within which we operate. That we do have a connection to the larger picture is largely thanks to the pioneering thinker Émile Durkheim. He recognized that, if anything can explain how we as individuals relate to society, then it is suicide: Why does it happen? What goes wrong? Why is it more common in some places than others? In seeking answers to these questions, Durkheim wrote a work that has fascinated, challenged and informed its readers for over a hundred years. Far-sighted and trail-blazing in its conclusions, Suicide makes an immense contribution to our understanding to what must surely be one of the least understandable of acts. A brilliant study, it is regarded as one of the most important books Durkheim ever wrote.

A classic book about the phenomenon of suicide and its social causes written by one of the world's most influential sociologists.Emile Durkheim's Suicide addresses the phenomenon of suicide and its social causes. Written by one of the world's most influential sociologists, this classic argues that suicide primarily results from a lack of integration of the individual into society. Suicide provides readers with an understanding of the impetus for suicide and its psychological impact on the victim, family, and society.

This book presents a review and criticism of all sociological literature on suicide, from Emile Durkheim's influential Suicide (1897) to contemporary writings by sociologists who have patterned their own work on Durkheim's. Douglas points out fundamental weaknesses in the structural-functional study of suicide, and offers an alternative theoretical approach. He demonstrates the unreliability of official statistics on suicide and contends that Durkheim's explanations of suicide rates in terms of abstract social meanings are founded on an inadequate and misleading statistical base. The study of suicidal actions, Douglas argues, requires an examination of the individual's own construction of his actions. He analyzes revenge, escape, and sympathy motives; using diaries, notes, and observers'reports, he shows how the social meanings of actual cases should be studied.Originally published in 1967.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.