Revisiting Suicide

From a Socio-Psychological Lens

Kanchan Bharati, Lancy Lobo, Jayesh Shah

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000260991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia anormale

This book provides a socio-psychological enquiry of the phenomenon of suicide in the Indian context. It addresses the rising trend of suicides across the world and through case studies explores its primary reasons, the after-effects on survivors and families and measures to prevent them.

The volume focuses on deciphering the social and psychological meanings associated with suicide. Through an examination of psycho-social autopsies of numerous cases, it highlights the patterns and trends which emerge around mental well-being, suicide and bereavement. It examines the primary roadblocks for robust suicide prevention measures and provides great insights into behavioral and personality categories and their relationship with suicide.

Offering theoretical and empirical perspectives on the issue of suicide and self-harm, this book will be of interest to students, researchers, and faculty of behavioral sciences, psychology, social anthropology, demography, criminology, social work and sociology. It will also be an essential read for psychologists and counselors, policy makers, NGOs, CSOs, legal experts and media personnel working in the area of suicide prevention and research.

1 Suicide

Actors and factors

The rising trend of suicides and deaths is a major cause of concern for the society and policy makers. Preventing and reducing suicidal behavior are now important targets of the World Health Organization (WHO), which estimates that, worldwide, about 1 million people die by suicide every year.¹ This represents a global annual suicide rate of 16 per lakh people. In addition, the suicide-attempt rate is about 10–15 times more than the suicide rate. Asia alone contributes as many as 60% of the world’s suicides. Despite this, suicide has received relatively less attention in Asia including India than it has in Europe and the USA (Hendin 2008).

Twenty-first century is seen as ‘a century full of stress and tensions’. The virtue of patience has been disappearing from the families and more particularly among the youth and the teenagers. The demand is for instantaneous fulfillment of needs and desires. This combined with high aspirations for educational achievement; successful career and upward mobility in the social ladder have become the mandates that need to be ‘met at any cost’. This phenomenon plays out differently across various social contexts, making young people and their families ‘anxious and be on the edge’ all the time. There is no systemic input for life skills training, or positive coping through parenting and schooling.

As a result there is an increase in anxiety, stress and depression. Such a situation is a fertile soil for emergence of suicidal tendencies because depression and suicide are closely interlinked. People with depression are often stigmatized and excluded by family and society. They also tend to under-perform in education and work, thereby remain increasingly deprived of economic and social opportunities, with a decreased quality of life. Depression also escalates the cycle of poverty and poor health, the impact which is huge but unmeasured. India is home to an estimated 57 million people² (18% of the global estimate) who are affected by depression. With India witnessing significant changes (including globalization, urbanization, migration and modernization) that is coupled with rapid socio-demographic transition, depression is likely to increase in the coming years.

Much has been written about suicide and the nature of the act by philosophers and theologians through the ages. However, it has especially fascinated social scientists for two reasons: first, because of its universality and, second, because of its very nature and definition, suicide constitutes a form of deviant behavior. Both of these reasons make suicide an important and major object of social inquiry. In the eighteenth-century West, the social meaning and perception of suicide was largely shaped by religion, and it was regarded as a moral problem, but since the beginning of the twentieth century it has come to be regarded as a social problem requiring explanation (Lukes 1973).

In India, research on suicide and suicidal behavior has received less attention despite a good proportion of population being under the threat of suicidal death. Only about 25% of the deaths in India are registered, and only about 10% are medically certified (Hendin 2008). Studies of large-scale verbal autopsy of all deaths in rural regions reveal that the suicide rate in the rural areas is three to four times higher than that reported by the government (Gajalakshmi and Peto 2007), so the official suicide rate reported in the country is probably lower than the actual rate (Sahoo et al. 2010). Hence, crucial challenge in studying suicide in Asia including India is the availability and quality of suicide data. In countries where data are available, there are problems of underestimation due to inaccurate ascertainment and delay in reporting suicidal deaths (Chen et al. 2012).

There are many research studies on suicide for different states of India but there is no specific study based on social demography and mental health of the citizen of the country. This book offers theoretical and empirical perspectives to the issue of suicide. It concentrates on the social, economic and psychological determinants within the family correlating with the social, cultural and economic attributes of those families where suicidal deaths and attempts had occurred. It thus explores the nature of the problem and networks of underlying reasons for suicide. It also attempts to understand the survivor’s dilemmas – those who survived suicide-attempt, their families and response of bereaved families. It brings out the transformational change that happened on individuals and the families as an outcome of suicide-attempt/death.

The study has tried to assess the prime reasons for suicide and the life of the family after such act. By looking suicide as a social problem, this study contemplates some important queries:

1. In what way the social-psychological conditions and issues (such as disrupted social relations, social isolation, family discords, illness and psychopathology) are found to be associated with suicide-attempts/deaths?
2. Are there any patterns of suicide emerging and between different groups of people who are considered to be influenced by social conditions (e.g., people’s relationships with one another; their position in society; their access to resources; and their inadequate social integration/regulations, status integration, cultural norms, values and beliefs)?
3. Does specific age group, marital status, gender group and income-group have any specific relevance with suicidal tendencies?

Suicide is a complex phenomenon largely associated with social and psychological distress of the person as well as of the family. Pattern of suicidal deaths is a reflection of the prevailing social set-up and mental health status of humans who live therein and hence demands attention not only to examine the magnitude but also decipher the patterns.

Understanding suicide: theoretical perspectives

Throughout human history numerous theories have been advanced in an effort to explain why people seek to take their own lives. In general, these theories can be classified into four groups such as biological (including biochemical, neurotransmitters), psychological, psychiatric and sociological. Suicide finds mention even in ancient literature, religious or non-religious literature. But it was Emile Durkheim (1951 [orig. 1897]), a French sociologist, who made a sociological study of the suicide and presented its accounts in his book Le Suicide. He viewed suicide as a conscious act out of an individual’s will, although a result of one’s social conditions or circumstances. In other words, suicide is an individual act but the causes can ultimately be related to the social set-up, influenced by various interacting factors of social, psychological, economic, biological/psychiatric, cultural and environmental domains. Following the footsteps of Durkheim, sociologists have studied the phenomenon of suicide as a behavior determined by number of individual and social factors.

Suicide is not one thing, even though it is one word (Interian et al. 2018). As a discipline, suicidology cuts across various academic disciplines and perspectives, making the real world of suicide as complex and interdisciplinary. It is important to recognize that different perspectives or approaches are complementary and consideration of their mutual relevance is significant for effective understanding and for preventive measures.

Sociological dimension of suicide

Sociological theories focus on the significance of the social environment; social relationships; and other social, economic and cultural factors in the etiology of suicide.

Durkheim presented the sociological dimension of suicide through his work on understanding suicidal rates among Catholics and Protestants.³ It inferred the explanation of suicide through the lens of social integration and regulation. To him though suicide is an individual act, its causes are rooted in an individual’s social setting. Essentially, he regarded man to be a social being whose sense of self-belonging depended highly on his/her interaction with his/her community/society. In his view, suicide is the result of social disorganization, the lack of social integration and/or social solidarity vis-à-vis individual which shows certain suicidal patterns. Based on individuals’ relationship with society he pointed out four types of suicides:

1. Altruistic suicide, i.e., a suicide due to a highly intimate interaction, integration and interconnection shared between an individual and a group/community/society
2. Egoistic suicide, i.e., a suicide of a self-centered person who lacks altruistic feelings and is usually cut off from the mainstream society due to little social integration
3. Anomic suicide, i.e., a suicide by individuals due to exceedingly limited social regulation and integration
4. Fatalistic suicide, i.e., suicide because of heightened overregulation in society and the inability to cope with it

Durkheim established that the more a person feels socially integrated and connected, or has a sense of belonging socially, the likeliness of him/her dying by suicide is less. Similarly the more unstable an individual’s social integration, the individual is more likely to end life. He opined that suicide incidences or rates could diminish when there is a balance of regulation and integration. It is essential that individual’s desires and expectations must be regulated and monitored by the social ties in order to keep them under check (Mukherjee and Kumar 2017). Durkheim’s approach had received its share of criticism major being his failure in operationalizing the definition of social facts, issues with the use of official statistical data involving inaccuracy, overemphasizing externality and less importance to individuals thoughts. Nonetheless, his work is still relevant as it gave significant insights to the problem of suicide and patterns through wider aspects of human-society relationship. People who attempt suicide are much more likely to say they feel lonely and isolated from others and claim disconnections from society, confirming what Durkheim hypothesized over 100 years ago (Zhang 2019).

Another social explanation that stands out is the social interaction and social interpretive approach of actions and behavior, seeing the social meaning, pioneered by Max Weber, Jacob, Douglas and writers on phenomenological philosophy. This approach studies suicide by unearthing the complexity of shared and individual meanings of the actions and reasons involved in the process of the act through careful description and analysis of features of the social, cultural and interpersonal milieu or context in which an individual engages in suicidal behavior (Maskill et al. 2005).

Jacobs (1967) used interpretive approach to understand the su...