Examine sociological contributions to understanding the causes of suicide (21)

Suicide is the ultimate deviant act. Ending your own life deviates far from the social norm of wanting to preserve and improve your life instead of wanting to end it, so naturally sociologists want to understand what makes people want to end their own lives so that we can try to prevent it. It was only up until 1961 that suicide was made legal in the UK and it has been an extremely understudied topic up until recently due to Durkheim's study in 1897 as it was so successful that sociologists didn't think there was anything else to contribute to the topic – the fact that up until fairly recently it has been an extremely taboo subject, especially in religious countries, has also contributed to the understudying of this topic. There have been four main sociologists who have contributed to our understanding of the causes of suicide: Durkheim, who used a positivist approach and Atkinson, Taylor and Douglad who used an interpretivist approach.

Durkheim was the first sociologist to study to the topic of suicide and he used a positivist approach which is strange when studying such a seemingly interpretivist and personal topic, but he did this in order to try to prove that sociology can and should be studied as a science and that we can see cause and effect by using observable patterns or regularities. Durkheim discovered and notes four regular patterns when using official suicide statistics and from this he devised explanations for the causes of suicide. Changes in suicide rates coincided with other changes is society such as war, economic depressions and surprisingly times of prosperity, so he concluded that times of extreme despair and prosperity were causes of suicide. He also discovered that suicide rates between different social groups varied, for example single people committed suicide