This Week:

Quote of the Week

Anti-War Letters and Calls

The Most Dangerous Jobs in the Nation

Killing Ourselves Silently, Part 2: The Sociology of Suicide

Greetings,

I decided to call the current series on suicide "Killing Ourselves Silently" because the subject of suicide is a sort of "silent killer" in our society. Even though it's twice as common as murder, few people who haven't been directly touched by it seem to have given it much thought. This week I talk a little bit about the social phenomenon that is suicide. Next week I will talk a bit about why I think it is so little discussed and understood in the United States of America. Maybe there will even be a Part 4 after that; who knows?

No Propaganda Watch this week, per se. The 2nd piece, on dangerous jobs, is illustrative of a subtle form of what might be called propaganda but, since it is not orchestrated or deliberate, it can't really go by that name. Still, the process by which large corporations filter the news has certain predictable effects that would not, I suspect, be terribly different if it were to be orchestrated or deliberate.

I thought it was a good idea to send out cute little (and I mean "little") thank-you notes to the recent donors to Nygaard Notes. Little did I know that these petite cards are "unconventional" in the eyes of the Postal Service, and thus would require 11 cents of additional postage. So, they all got returned to me and you donors may not have gotten them yet. And all this after I said you would get them last week. Sorry! Boy, I'll bet AOL-TIME-Warner doesn't have problems like this with their subscriber mailings....

Welcome to the new readers this week, and thank you to the donors who sent in their pledges. It isn't even pledge time yet!

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"Many individuals' suicidal depression is socially constructed and produced. The cure is to rectify the social injustice, not just the individual pathology."

-- Ronald Maris, Ph.D., of the Center for the Study of Suicide at the University of South Carolina.

Anti-War Letters and Calls

I hope many of you have written, called, or visited your elected representatives to tell them of your opposition to expanding the current U.S. war to other countries. If not, please do so this week.

The two-part message is simple: further U.S. military actions will victimize untold numbers of innocent people and will not reduce terror. If you feel bold, you could even introduce the idea that such attacks by our government actually ARE terror, being intended as they are to achieve political ends by using violence. If you have the time, perhaps you could add that such actions are fantastically costly, would be on very shaky ground in terms of international law, and have very little support in other countries. If you're lucky, you have a representative to whom such details matter. If not, at least they will know that the U.S. war machine does not have unqualified support in their district.

The Most Dangerous Jobs in the Nation

New Year's Day brought us a story in the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") headlined "Death Toll Among Police Was Up in 2001." The article told us that 2001 was "the deadliest year for police officers since 1974," largely due to the deaths of September 11th . Even if one factors out the New York City deaths, slightly more cops were killed in the line of duty in 2001 than were killed in the year 2000. I have no doubt that the facts in the article, sourced to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and the Concerns of Police Survivors, are accurate.

The question is, why are we reading this? I realize that it is quite fashionable these days to revere the average policeman or woman, and I am not unsympathetic to the people who hold these stressful and dangerous jobs. I admit that I have been critical of police officers on a regular basis for abusing their authority, especially in my own city of Minneapolis, but that has little if anything to do with having sympathy for the men and women in blue.

Still, police work is not the most dangerous job in the United States. In fact, it's not even close. There are ten different occupations that carry a greater risk of death, the top four of which are fisherpeople, timber workers, airplane pilots (all of whom are 6 times more likely that police to die on the job) and metal workers (4 times more likely). Roofers, truck drivers, and farmers are also at greater occupational risk than are police. Even when you look at the risk of being murdered on the job, cops don't top the list. That distinction belongs to taxi drivers, who are three times more likely to be murdered than cops. (Yikes! I've been a cab driver on several different occasions—who knew?)

My problem is not that we often read these stories about police being killed in the line of duty. My problem is with the almost total absence of stories on other workers who are at risk of dying on the job. And the problem extends beyond this example. There was a front-page story in the papers this week about the first U.S. soldier—a Green Beret—to die from "enemy fire" in Afghanistan. The number of innocent Afghans who have died as a direct result of the American attacks is not precisely known (a fact which is telling in itself) but likely numbers more than 4,000 to date, a number greater than the number of innocent Americans killed on September 11th. Yet this does not make it to the front pages in this country. Something is wrong here.

Let me make myself clear: I am not arguing to take the deaths of the innocent Americans off of the front pages. And I don't necessarily object to the death of the Green Beret being so prominently placed. What I object to is the criteria that makes front-page news of the death of a single military man engaged in combat while the deaths of thousands of innocents are barely noted. If human death and suffering are important to us, then they should be important no matter who is doing the suffering. Farmers as well as police. Afghans as well as New Yorkers. To dismiss the members of certain groups as unworthy of our compassion is a most dangerous and contemptible form of chauvinism.

Killing Ourselves Silently, Part 2: The Sociology of Suicide

Last week I mentioned Emile Durkheim and his famous 1897 book, "Suicide: A Study in Sociology." Durkheim's book is probably the most influential work on the subject of suicide you can find—I have seen it cited almost everywhere I've looked as I researched the subject. Now I myself am citing it! And for good reason, as I think you'll see.

Durkheim's basic idea was that, although suicide appears to be a phenomenon relating to the individual, it is actually a social phenomenon at its root. While this might seem a little crazy, since there would appear to be no more obvious case of individual action than that of killing oneself, it's not as crazy as it first seems. There are many individualistic explanations for suicide that are commonly accepted by many Americans, foremost among them being mental illness, depression, and heredity. But not all people who commit suicide are depressed, nor do all who are depressed commit suicide. The same is true of mental illness, and the idea that the tendency toward suicide is hereditary is also a myth. Durkheim addresses and debunks all of these myths, which apparently were prevalent in 19th-century France, as they still are in 21st-century United States.

Durkheim places every person in a social context, within which the bonds of the individual to the community—and vice versa—are organized by all sorts of well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals. As he put it,

"There is for each people a collective force of a definite amount of energy, impelling people to self-destruction. The victim's acts which at first seem to express only one's personal temperament are really the supplement and prolongation of a social condition which they express externally."

This sounds mighty strange in America, where we are taught from the cradle that the individual is everything.

His theory explains four different types of suicide; that is, four different reasons why people are compelled (or "decide") to take their own lives. Stick with me while I briefly summarize them here.

Egoistic Suicide

Durkheim's first category, "egoistic suicide," says that suicide occurs when what he called the "collective personality" of the community, or society, is weak. Here's what he said on the subject in his classic book (forgive the male pronouns; they're all in the original, as was the apparent custom in 1897): "The more weakened the groups to which an individual belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests. If we agree to call this state egoism, in which the individual ego asserts itself in excess in the face of the social ego and at its expense, we may call egoistic the special type of suicide springing from excessive individualism."

Altruistic Suicide

Durkheim also discussed a less-common cause of suicide that he called "altruistic" suicide. This is sort of the opposite of egoistic suicide, since it stems from excessive identification with the group's needs or, as he put it, "when social integration is too strong." In altruistic suicide, an individual gives his or her life willingly for what he or she perceives to be the good of the community or society.

Such a form of suicide is quite "un-American," we might say, being seen much more in societies with more of an emphasis on the collective welfare than on the welfare of the individual. Since the United States is so outrageously individualistic, these "altruistic" suicides are almost incomprehensible to the average American, and are very difficult to explain when witnessed. For real-world examples, think of pictures or stories you may have seen from other societies in which individuals willingly sacrifice their lives to their gods. For a more current example, recall Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in protest of the war in Vietnam. Or, you could picture whoever-it-was willingly giving their lives in their attempts to destroy the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Fatalistic Suicide

A third social cause of suicide Durkheim termed "fatalistic" suicide, resulting from what he referred to as an "over-regulation" of the bodies—and the psyches—of people. Examples fatalistic suicides might include those of slaves, or of prisoners with no hope of escape. He didn't spend much time on this type of suicide, perhaps considering it the easiest of his four types to understand. Give me liberty or give me death.

Anomic Suicide

"Anomic" suicide was of particular interest to Durkheim, although I don't know exactly why. It is of particular interest to Nygaard, as well, and that's because it is the most easily addressed and ameliorated by concrete political action. The word "anomie" literally means "a lack of purpose, identity, or ethical values in a person or in a society," according to my Webster's. For Durkheim, anomic suicide occurs when an individual finds her or himself in a society where the desired norms of living are perceived by the individual as impossible to achieve within that society. Suicide rates go up, for example, at times of economic crisis, when more people perceive that the society is not providing them the opportunity to support themselves, to support their families, or to move up the socioeconomic ladder as they had been led to expect to be able to do. Conversely, suicide rates tend to go down in times of war.

The Social Phenomenon of Suicide

Many have studied the phenomenon of suicide in the one hundred years since Durkheim published his book, and not too many have successfully refuted his basic point: that suicide is a social phenomenon, representing far more than a collection of individual tragedies that can only be addressed psychologically (if at all). The evidence mounts, in fact, that some broader factors—under our control to varying degrees—compel people to commit suicide at higher or lower rates in a given community or society. While Durkheim seemed convinced that suicide was only a social phenomenon, I believe it is far more likely that an individual suicide is tied to both one's internal psychology and to external social forces. It's hard to prove either way, since the record of each suicide is necessarily the result of survivors attempting to reconstruct a life after the fact.

Some scholars contend that "individuals' isolation from society and the support it provides, caused by increasing urbanization, is the root of suicide." This is supported by social scientists who generally agree that, although the term ‘suicide' was first coined in the mid-seventeenth century, "a significant increase in the suicide rates of the economically developed countries of Europe and elsewhere did not occur until the onset of the industrial revolution."

Studies in the modern era show a correlation between welfare expenditures and suicide rates: The lower the expenditure for public welfare within a state, the higher the suicide rate; the more generous the expenditure, the lower the suicide rate, according to longtime UCLA suicidologist (I'm not making up that word; that's what they call themselves!) Edwin Shneidman.

All of these observations fit with the notion that the increasing alienation and inequality in industrial societies increases the incidence of both egoistic and anomic suicide in those societies. This was of great concern to Durkheim, and also to myself. Is it possible that all of these suicidologists are correct, and the very nature of our modern society is causing us to kill ourselves at an alarming rate? Next week I ponder the plausibility of that, and related, ideas.