Impact Of Emile Durkheim On Suicide

Emile Durkheim on Suicide and Society

In this paper my major point is that suicide and society should be taken seriously in classrooms and around the world. Durkheim's focus on suicide was intended to shed light on a more general level of unhappiness and despair in society. Suicide was the horrific top of the iceberg of mental distress created by modern capitalism He tried to explain why people had become so unhappy in modern societies. In traditional societies, people's identities are closely tied to belonging to a clan or a class. A person might be a baker or married to their second Recousin without having to make any self-conscious decisions for themselves. They can just step into a place created for them by their family and the existing fabric of society. Modern capitalism it's the individual that now begins to choose everything; what job to take, what religion to follow, who to marry and where to belong. If things go badly, the individual is in crueler place than ever before that means there's no one else to blame but themselves. Failure becomes a terrible judgement upon the individual. This is the burden of life in modern capitalism. In modern capitalism, envy grows rife. It is easy to become deeply dissatisfied with one's job, not because it's objectively awful but because of tormenting thoughts about all
Peoples with different interests, different amounts of money, members of different subcultures, races, and sexual orientations, somehow all manage to hold together, in this thing we call society. Society must somehow endure periods of intense change without falling apart. We have political change, technological change population growth, and economic crisis. All these things can be massively disruptive. Sometimes we might even worry that the fabric of society won't be able to take the stress. These are the questions we ask of how society holds together, and how to understand when it goes wrong.