Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction

By Jason Manning

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780813944357

Jason Manning

Jason Manning is the author of numerous frontier novels. A member of SHEAR, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, he has a Master's Degree from Stephen F. Austin State University, specializing in the early national and antebellum periods of American history. He is also an advocate for the protection and recovery of wolves and other endangered species in the United States. He and his family live in the historic town of Nacogdoches, Texas.

Book preview

Suicide

Studies in Pure Sociology

Donald Black, Editor

Suicide

The Social Causes of Self-Destruction

Jason Manning

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2020

ISBN 978-0-8139-4434-0 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4439-5 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4435-7 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

For my parents, Ray and Cathy Manning

Contents

Preface

Prologue: The Death of Mohamed Bouazizi

1. Suicide and Conflict

2. Suicide and Inequality

3. Suicide and Relationships

4. Suicide and Support

Conclusion

Appendix A. On Methodology

Appendix B. On Suicide and Social Contagion

Notes

References

Index

Preface

Suicide is one of sociology’s oldest subjects. Emile Durkheim’s famous Suicide: A Study in Sociology, is revered as a classic, and its ideas are often featured in introductory sociology courses. It is renowned partly for being counterintuitive. People in the modern West tend to think of suicide as a profoundly individualistic action, something firmly rooted in the internal drama of the human mind. Durkheim forcefully argued that suicide varied predictably from one society to another and was thus something explicable with external social conditions. First hearing of these ideas as an undergraduate student, I was immediately intrigued. It was fascinating to think that this seemingly personal decision was predictably shaped by impersonal, external forces. I checked out a copy of Durkheim’s book from the campus library, found a quiet corner, and began to read.

The spirit of this book harkens back to Durkheim’s foundational work and to the optimism and confidence it displayed. It reflects my position that suicide is a social behavior and one that we can explain both sociologically and scientifically. Though a psychiatric model currently dominates public discourse on suicide, sociology still has important contributions to make toward understanding this topic. And these contributions go beyond uncritically clinging to the ideas of the field’s revered founder. Thus this book takes up Durkheim’s spirit but also departs from his substance. While my work incorporates ideas from his classic theory, it utilizes a relatively new kind of approach to sociology—an innovative theoretical strategy called pure sociology, first developed by sociologist Donald Black in the 1970s. In doing so, it also draws upon a body of work concerned with something other than suicide as such—conflict, and all the myriad ways that people handle it. The result is that many of my ideas treat suicide as a variable aspect of conflict, asking why some conflicts are more likely than others to drive people to self-destruction. Though this approach might seem narrow—people kill themselves for many reasons besides conflict—I argue that it shows a new path for the sociology of suicide, one in which we shift our focus away from comparing the suicide rates of groups to comparing the likelihood of suicide across different social situations.

I explain all this in more detail in the following chapters. For now, I ask readers who might be more comfortable with the traditional Durkheimian approach to keep an open mind about the potential of this new strategy. And I invite readers unfamiliar with sociology altogether to learn about all the strange ways that suicide, or any other human behavior, can vary across different social environments.

I should, however, give a small warning. Suicide is a form of violence that hits close to home for many readers. In modern America, as well as many other countries, suicide is both more frequent than homicide and more widely distributed across regions, ethnic groups, and social classes. It is likely that many of my readers will know someone who has died by suicide and may be interested in the topic exactly because of this. If so, my condolences. I am aware that suicide often produces a special sort of grief and can be a particularly difficult kind of bereavement to deal with. But beware that the remainder of this book approaches suicide with scientific detachment, as a strange phenomenon in need of explaining. I believe this the proper attitude for the sociologist to take, as moralizing can get in the way of describing and explaining, but some may be put off by it. So too for many of the cases I describe in the following pages, which readers may find disturbing. Perhaps even some of the theoretical ideas I advance might cause offense. For instance, the idea that suicide can be a weapon of social conflict, or that it is ever anything other than a symptom of uncontrollable illness, might be unwelcome. If you object that a deceased love one would never have meant to hurt anyone left behind, you are likely right—the patterns I describe in these chapters are not the only patterns that exist and are perhaps not the pattern that best matches the cases in your own life. But the reverse is also true, and there is value in considering patterns of behavior that may at first seem alien.

Should you dislike the book, the blame is mine. But if you find it valuable, I must share credit with a great many people who helped it come to be. I first studied sociology, including the topic of suicide, as an undergraduate at Christopher Newport University, where I was inspired by professors Bob Durrell, Joseph F. Healy, Lea Pellet, and Virginia Purtle. My sociological education continued as a graduate student at the University of Virginia, a department filled with outstanding intellects. I learned a great deal from the faculty there, including Rae Lesser Blumberg, Stephan Fuchs, Paul Kingston, Krishan Kumar, Jeffrey Olick, and the late Steven Nock. I also learned a great deal from my fellow graduate students, most especially Bradley Campbell, Laura Holian, and Justin Snyder. Their friendship and colleagueship were a boon beyond all measure.

The same can be said for the opportunity to work with Donald Black, under whose guidance I completed my doctoral studies and whose own highly innovative work provides most of the foundation for all that I have done since. I first read his Social Structure of Right and Wrong shortly before arriving at the University of Virginia and understood right away that I had discovered something new and exciting. I am grateful I was able to take his courses and learn from him in person. This book would be impossible without the theories, concepts, and perspective that he developed over many years in his unending quest to advance scientific sociology. He also read and commented on several earlier phases of the work. Aside from my intellectual debt, I owe him many thanks for his advice, support, and the occasional beer. It has truly been a privilege to know him.

Given the influence of my time at Virginia, I must also thank the University’s Bayly-Tiffany Scholarship for generously funding much of my graduate study.

As a faculty member at West Virginia University, work on this book was facilitated by having welcoming and supportive colleagues, including especially Corey Colyer and Rachel Stein. In addition, Rae Lesser Blumberg, Bradley Campbell, Mark Cooney, Joseph E. Davis, Elizabeth Nalepa, Larry Nichols, and James Tucker deserve thanks for commenting on earlier phases of this work. Richard Holway, history and social sciences editor at University of Virginia Press, also deserves thanks for his helpful comments and suggestions regarding the book manuscript. So too do managing editor Ellen Satrom, who provided additional feedback prior to publication, and manuscript editor George Roupe, whose attention to detail was crucial for sanding and polishing the final product.

Some of the data cited in this book come from a study of coroners’ files, which would not have been possible without the cooperation and assistance of Dr. Ronald Holmes and the wonderful, friendly, and professional investigators and staff at the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office. I owe similar thanks to Patricia McCay, coordinator of the West Virginia Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, for facilitating my study of domestic homicide-suicide cases. I also owe a special debt to Gage Donahue and the members of the Louisville Survivors of Suicide support group for inviting me into their midst and reminding me that suicide is not just a scientific curiosity but a human tragedy with great costs for those left behind.

Material from previous scholarly publications is incorporated in this book, though with substantial alteration and reorganization. Parts of my 2012 article Suicide as Social Control, published in Sociological Forum, are visible in chapters 1–4 and in the conclusion. My 2015 article Aggressive Suicide, published in the International Journal of Law Crime and Justice, contributes material to chapters 1 and 3. Parts of my 2015 article Suicide and Social Time, published in Dilemas: Revistas de Estudos de Conflicto e Controle Social, are modified to make up large sections of chapters 2 and 3 and a small part of the conclusion. I thank these journals and their publishers for permission to use this material.

During the later stages of the book, as I worried about deadlines and revisions, I was extremely grateful for the encouragement and understanding of my wise and beautiful wife, Kirsten Youngee Song. I cannot imagine a better partner.

Finally, the biggest debt is to my parents, Ray and Cathy Manning. They fed and sheltered me, trained and taught me, loved and encouraged me. They always provided unwavering support, even when their kid decided to spend eight years in graduate school studying strange and morbid topics. And they always set a good example, one that I can only hope to live up to. They have always worked hard and have learned to do many different things. They are wise and thoughtful. They are kind and generous to everyone they meet. They are the best parents a son could ask for, and this book is dedicated to them.

Suicide

PROLOGUE

The Death of Mohamed Bouazizi

Mohamed Bouazizi rose on the morning of December 17, 2010, and set off for work. He left his modest stucco home in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid and headed for the town center, where by eight o’clock he was pushing along a wheelbarrow full of fruits and vegetables. The night before, he had acquired about $200 worth of produce on credit. He was the breadwinner for a family of eight, and with luck, he would make enough selling the produce to continue supporting his mother, brother, and younger siblings.

The local police arrived around 10:30 to find the street vendor busy at work. They confronted him about the fact that he was vending without a permit. Mohamed and other local vendors often experienced such harassment and understood that the intent was to shake them down for a bribe (Fahim 2011). But Mohamed did not have enough money to bribe the officers, nor did he have any personal connections that would give him leverage with the corrupt local government.

Eyewitnesses disagree on the exact details of Mohamed’s encounter with the police. Some say he was beaten, slapped, and spat upon by a policewoman—something that would have greatly shamed Mohamed. She humiliated him, his sister later said. Everyone was watching (quoted in Fahim 2011). All agree he was publicly chastised and that the police confiscated his wheelbarrow, produce, and electronic scale. The incident left Mohamed humiliated, angered, and deprived of his only means of making a living and providing for his family (Abouzeid 2011; Fahim 2011; Ryan 2011; Sengupta 2011).

Mohamed immediately went to the governor’s office to lodge a complaint and to demand the return of his costly electronic scale. The governor, however, refused to see or listen to him. At one point, a desperate Mohamed threatened that he would burn himself if the governor would not hear his case. Still the governor refused.

It had not been an idle threat. Mohamed left the office, went to a nearby petrol station, and acquired a can of gasoline. He returned and stood in the middle of the street, facing the governor’s office. He shouted, How do you expect me to make a living? Then he poured the gasoline over himself and struck a match (Simon 2011).

Mohamed was engulfed in flame. Bystanders rushed to his aid and eventually succeed in putting out the fire. Mohamed, severely burned, was taken to a hospital, where he eventually succumbed to his injuries.

The story of his suicide by fire quickly spread throughout the country. Many sympathizers blamed the corrupt government for driving him to such a desperate act, and within hours the first protestors took to the streets. His friends and relatives gathered outside the governor’s office, throwing coins at the gate and shouting, Here is your bribe! (Fahim 2011). When Mohamed died in the hospital a month after the incident, thousands participated in his funeral procession, during which they chanted, We will avenge you . . . we will make those who caused your death weep (Falk 2011; Sengupta 2011).

The protests grew larger, more widespread, and more violent. Attempts to suppress them were ineffective and counterproductive. Fearing for his safety, Tunisia’s autocratic president fled into exile, ending his twenty-three-year rule (Noueihed 2011). And still the effects of Mohamed’s death continued to radiate outward. Over a dozen aggrieved citizens in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere followed his example by lighting themselves on fire as similar waves of protest, riot, and revolution swept through the Arab world (Abouzeid 2011). The Arab Spring uprisings, as they are now known, led to regime change, civil war, and the mass migration of refugees—a cascade of geopolitical changes triggered by the suicide of one enraged and desperate street vendor.

In some ways, the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi is unusual: most who commit suicide do not publicly burn themselves, and most deaths do not have such widespread impact on society. But his story does illustrate some much more common features of suicide.

First, his suicide was sparked by social causes. Legal officials had left him humiliated and suffering from a major financial blow. Whether or not psychological factors predisposed him to such a reaction, the fact remains that he killed himself when and where he did because of his interactions with other people—people who exerted social dominance over him, humiliated him, and took his property. We can observe similar social causes in many cases of suicide. For example, Aaron Swartz, an American inventor and copyright activist, hanged himself when faced with the threat of prolonged imprisonment and massive fines for allegedly illegally downloading academic papers from an online database (Dean 2013; Kemp, Trapasso, and McShane 2013). Prior to asphyxiating herself in a gas oven, poet Sylvia Plath suffered a devastating abandonment when her husband left her for another woman (Becker 2003). And near the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the head as Allied forces closed in on his headquarters, assuring the final defeat of his Nazi regime and his fall from power.

Mohamed’s suicide also had social consequences. The typical suicide differs from his only in that its consequences play out on a smaller scale. While few suicides result in political upheaval, suicide often has tremendous consequences for the family, friends, and acquaintances of the deceased. Rock musician Dave Grohl described the suicide of his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain as probably the worst thing that has happened to me in my life (Fullerton 2009). When Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi committed suicide in 2010, his roommate—who had previously used a web camera to spy on Clementi during a homosexual encounter—was publicly blamed for the suicide and sentenced by a federal court to thirty days in jail, three hundred hours of community service, mandatory counseling, and a $10,000 fine (Demarco and Friedman 2012). And in 2013 American country singer Mindy McCready, devastated by the suicide of her boyfriend and soul mate David Wilson, shot herself on the spot where he had killed himself one month earlier (Red 2013; Red and Beekman 2013). Suicide destroys relationships, alters reputations, and can lead to grief, guilt, blame, shame, sympathy, therapy, vengeance, and more suicide.

Finally, Mohamed’s death was a social behavior in and of itself. He first threatened suicide in an attempt to obtain redress and then followed through on his threat as a way of expressing grievances against the corrupt officials who had wronged him. His suicide was an act of protest, carried out using a dramatic means of death also found in other widely publicized cases of political protest. The suicide was no less social than the mass demonstrations it inspired.

Other suicides are also social acts. Some are instances of altruistic self-sacrifice. Thus English explorer Lawrence Oates, seeing that his failing health was slowing his party’s trek back from the South Pole in 1912, chose to end his life by walking out into a blizzard rather than continue to delay his companions on their way to much-needed supplies.¹ Or suicide might be a ritualized way of displaying loyalty or reverence. For example, when Japanese shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu died in 1651, thirteen of his closest advisors ritualistically disemboweled themselves in a final demonstration of fealty (Rankin 2012:99). Still other suicides are, like Mohamed’s fiery death, a way of handling conflict—a means of expressing grievances, seeking justice, or getting even.

We see in Mohamed’s story that suicide is a form of social behavior sparked by social causes. It thus requires sociological explanation. This book presents such an explanation—a purely sociological theory of suicide. It addresses the kinds of social conditions that make people more or less likely to kill themselves. To do so, it focuses on cases, like that of Mohamed, where suicide is a way of expressing grievances or otherwise handling conflict. It may seem counterintuitive, but narrowing our focus in this way allows for much broader insights and helps us understand both conflict and suicide more generally. Thus this book not only addresses the question of when conflict leads to suicide, but the broader question of why different conflicts produce different outcomes—why fight rather than flight, why avoidance rather than negotiation, why capitulation rather than resistance. And my theory about why conflict leads to suicide also help us understand suicides that occur for other reasons, in other contexts. The theory helps us understand self-destructive behavior of all kinds. As we shall see, there is much that sociology can teach us about suicide.

1

Suicide and Conflict

I felt like I was up against a brick wall again! I was angry. I was furious at them for not taking this seriously and at myself for being a victim again. I was gonna show them. My husband took my daughters and said, Come on, Mom’s gonna off herself, and left. . . . I was gonna show them how much I was hurting, and I was gonna make him sorry that he said that to my daughters. (quoted in Heckler 1994:116)

Suicide is found in almost every human society, and is one of the most common forms of violence in the modern world. In the contemporary United States, the rate of suicide is about double the rate of homicide. And while criminal homicide in modern wealthy countries tends to be concentrated in a handful of high-poverty neighborhoods, suicide has a much wider distribution, touching the lives of a large swathe of the population.

But what exactly is suicide? The answer is not necessarily obvious. People engage in a wide variety of self-destructive behavior. Much of it is nonfatal, but sometimes the difference between death and survival is largely a matter of luck.¹ Scholars of suicide differ on whether to limit the term to fatalities or to also include unsuccessful attempts. They might also disagree on whether a particular mental state is necessary for an act of self-destruction to be considered a suicide. For instance, some might argue that if a young child of nine years old were to hang himself to death, it should not count as a suicide because the child did not understand the permanence of death.²

In this book we will use a broad definition: suicide is the self-application of lethal violence. Lethal means violence that is life threatening, as when someone is shot, stabbed, or hanged. Lethality is a continuum, a sliding scale of destructiveness or likelihood of causing death. The question of where exactly to draw the line between suicide and some lesser form of self-destruction need not concern us, as long as our definition focuses our attention on a family of similar acts. While the puzzle of why some suicide attempts are more lethal than others is important, for now it is enough to note that the topic of suicide includes all relatively lethal violence people inflict on themselves, even if they ultimately survive the attempt and regardless of whether they truly wanted to die.³

We can take a similar approach to the criterion of self-infliction, for this too can be a matter of degree. For instance, consider that people who inflict violence on themselves sometimes have assistance in doing so. American pathologist Jack Kevorkian, for example, assisted as many as 130 terminally ill patients in committing suicide by supplying them with and instructing them in how to use a device for injecting lethal chemicals into their body (Davey 2007; Jackson 2011). Some who wish to die even manipulate other people into acting as their executioners. The Bible describes how the Israelite King Saul, after being defeated in battle, ordered his own shield bearer to slay him with a sword (1 Samuel 31:4). In modern times, citizens in the United States and elsewhere might commit suicide by cop—goading police officers into shooting them through such actions as brandishing unloaded weapons (Mohandie, Meloy, and Collins 2009; Patton and Fremouw 2016). Again we have a continuum—the extent to which people are the sole and direct agent of their own demise varies, from pure suicide to cases that might better be classified as extreme risk taking or as voluntary execution. And again it is worthwhile to ask what explains this variation. But for the time being, we can simply consider all these cases as belonging to the same broad family, while focusing our attention on the cases in which people are most active in bringing about their own demise.

These considerations show that suicide is not a homogeneous category, and when we examine this category closely, we see many other kinds of variation as well. For instance, while many individuals make the decision to die completely on their own, others might be pressured or even ordered to kill themselves. When the Greek philosopher Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens, he was sentenced to act as his own executioner by drinking hemlock—and he chose to carry out the sentence, despite having an opportunity to flee into exile (Duff 1982–83). Suicide can be public, like the fiery death of Mohamed Bouazizi, or private, as when renowned art photographer Diane Arbus, long prone to bouts of severe depression, lay undiscovered for two days after fatally slitting her wrists in her New York City apartment (Bosworth 1984:320).⁴ Some suicides are impulsive, occurring with at most a few moments of planning, while others are highly premeditated. Japanese author Yukio Mishima had been planning his death for a year when he and several conspirators stormed and occupied the office of a Japanese military official, from which Mishima broadcast a political manifesto before ceremonially stabbing himself with a sword (Flanagan 2014:190–243). Some suicides involve only the death of a single individual, while others involve suicide pacts between two or more people who vow to end their lives together. Adolf Hitler died alongside his wife, Eva, who took a lethal dose of cyanide after the couple had said their final goodbyes to Hitler’s inner circle (Linge 2009). Suicide may even be a group project, as when thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate religious group ingested a fatal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka in 1997 in an effort to shed their earthly bodies and rendezvous with an alien spaceship (Lalich 2004).

Suicide, one can see, occurs in different forms and varieties. It might be collective or individual, voluntary or coercive, public or private, assisted or resisted, certainly fatal or a risky gamble with death. It might also arise from a variety of causes or contexts, such as depression, terminal illness, political struggle, or religious fervor. One major context for suicide is conflict, and it is this context that will be the main focus of this book.

Conflict, as defined by sociologist Donald Black, is a clash of right and wrong that occurs whenever anyone provokes or expresses a grievance (Black 1998:xiii; see also Black 2011:3). People might condemn others for arrogance, greed, sloth, impatience, or stupidity. We might criticize someone for not showing enough interest in us or for prying too deeply into our affairs, for having bad taste or for aping our own style, for failing to offer praise or for being a sycophant. We complain about being slighted and insulted, betrayed and abandoned, overworked and underpaid. Conflict is as ubiquitous as it is inescapable.⁵

People handle conflict in a staggering variety of ways. We might shun or avoid those who offend us—we give them the cold shoulder, force them to resign from the organization, or boycott their business. We might resort to aggression and violence—getting into fistfights, spanking misbehaving children, executing convicted criminals, or assassinating political opponents. We might talk things out and negotiate some solution to the problem, seeking compromise, repair, and peace. Or we might complain to a third party such as a legal official or workplace supervisor, and depend on this figure to find a solution and right the wrong. All these behaviors are, in sociological parlance, forms of conflict management or social control—ways of expressing and handling grievances, defining and responding to deviance, or otherwise handling conflict (Black 1976:105; Black 1998:3, 74–90). Conflict thus produces a plethora of behaviors, including gossip, feuds, lawsuits, arrests, divorce, terrorism, rioting, sit-ins, strikes, and genocide. It should come as no surprise, then, that it also produces suicide. Conflicts cause suicide, and much suicide is a way of handling or responding to conflict. That is, suicide can be a form of conflict management or social control (Baumgartner 1984; Black 1998:66, 72n2; Manning 2012). Indeed, any particular act of suicide might belong to one or more broader categories of conflict management, such as escape, protest, or punishment (compare Douglas 1967:299–334; Baechler 1975:55–199; Taylor 1982:140–93; Maris 1981:291).⁶

Suicide as Escape

In many cases, self-destruction is a means of fleeing from one’s enemies—a kind of escape of last resort. The Roman politician Brutus—who famously betrayed and helped assassinate the dictator Julius Caesar—thus turned to suicide when defeated by his rivals at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE. Having fled into the hills with his surviving men, he knew that his eventual capture was inevitable. He therefore ran himself through with his own sword after telling his men, By all means we must fly; not with our feet, however, but with our hands (Plutarch 1918:245). Defeated warriors throughout history have made a similar choice.⁷ Slaves might turn to suicide to escape from the abuse and punishment of their masters. African slaves on Cuban plantations sometimes killed themselves in the