A Critical Analysis Of Emile Durkheim's Four Types Of Suicide

Suicide. ‘The action of killing oneself intentionally.’ In his book ‘Suicide’, Emile Durkheim identifies four different types of suicide, splitting them into ‘integration’ and ‘regulation.’ The first being Egoistic suicide, which is where an individual isn’t integrated into a society or their community as much as they’d like to be. They do not have enough social bonds and therefore feel as though, no one will be affected by their death. The second type of suicide Durkheim identifies is Altruistic suicide and this is where the individual is integrated too much into a society, and they feel as though something larger than their life is taking control which causes them to end their life. Anomic suicide is when an individual has little regulation in their life. They are not regulated through social order or society’s norms and values. The last type of suicide Durkheim identified is Fatalistic suicide, where an individual has too much regulation in their lives and the only way to overcome the shackles of oppression is by attaining death.

Both men and women are fall prey to these four types of suicide and Durkheim believes that the only way to decrease suicide rates is by having a balance of integration and regulation in …show more content…
On the whole, men are more impulsive than women, which means they possess the tendency to act without properly thinking through the consequences. This is because acting spontaneously without any deliberation affects suicidal behaviour in two ways: ‘by influencing the way the suicidal act happens, and how the individual reacts to stressors.’ Research by Simon et al (2002) shows that in 24% of cases, suicide is an impulsive act and this allowed them to reach the conclusion that impulsivity is linked to higher suicide risk. The reason why men have been found to be more impulsive is because they are over represented in aggressive