Before exploring how literary reading can help people in despair decide to stay alive, in this chapter, I am going to review contemporary theories of suicidal behaviour, drawing mainly on ideas from social psychology and cultural anthropology. I believe this will be helpful, initially, in enabling better understanding of how suicidal ideas are presented in literary texts. And then, later in the book, I will suggest ways in which literary reading can usefully inform, modify and extend these theories.

Anomie and Alienation

Sociological perspectives probably start with Emile Durkheim's Suicide, published in Paris in 1897. Durkheim took the view, radical in his day, that suicide was not the result of deep moral failure, nor simply an individual's response to difficult life circumstances. Instead, it should be understood as a social fact, that is to say something that is external to, and imposed upon, individual actors. He drew attention to the effects of imbalance between social regulation and social integration. Social regulation is understood as the normative or moral demands placed on the individual that come with membership in a group, while social integration refers to the extent of social relations binding a person or a group to others, such that they are exposed to the moral demands of the group. On this basis he proposed four different types of suicide.

Egotistic suicide reflects a sense of not belonging, of having no stake in a community and results from a lack of social integration.

Durkheim argued that detachment, or what he called ‘excessive individuation’, meant people had little social support or guidance. He found that suicide was more common amongst unmarried men, who had few social connections.