{"id":8680,"date":"2016-12-29T08:20:00","date_gmt":"2016-12-29T08:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/?p=8680"},"modified":"2016-12-27T00:16:57","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T00:16:57","slug":"fatalistic-suicide-in-a-tight-knit-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/2016\/12\/29\/fatalistic-suicide-in-a-tight-knit-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Fatalistic Suicide in a Tight-Knit Community"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn, <\/span>“Adolescents under Pressure: A New Durkeheimian Framework for Understanding Adolescent Suicide in a Cohesive Community,” American Sociological Review<\/em>,<\/a><\/span> 2016<\/span><\/div>\n
\"Photo<\/a>
Photo by Kelly Teague, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1897, sociologist Emile Durkheim<\/a> wrote one of the first empirical studies of population health with his book <\/span>Suicide<\/span><\/i><\/a>. Over a hundred years later, students still learn about suicide and its causes from Durkheim. But in a recent study,\u00a0Anna Mueller<\/a> and Seth Abrutyn<\/a>\u00a0find that the type of suicide that Durkheim found least probable — fatalistic — is actually much more\u00a0likely to happen today. While Durkheim concluded that suicide was more often caused by\u00a0a lack<\/em> of societal regulation\u00a0or integration, Mueller and Abrutyn find that\u00a0too\u00a0much<\/em> regulation or integration\u00a0is just as likely to be a cause of suicide today.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div> To understand why people commit suicide today, the researchers\u00a0chose a small, upper-middle class, primarily white community with an\u00a0unusually high rate of teen suicide — Poplar Grove. They used Poplar Grove as a case study of the social causes of suicide, asking residents\u00a0about the community\u2019s culture and\u00a0their own personal understandings of the causes of suicide. The researchers conducted interviews with 71 people who lost loved ones to suicide, as well as with 13 focus groups made up of residents from Poplar Grove. In addition, the interviews included responses from mental health professionals and school personnel, who could act as expert informants about why these teens may have taken their own lives.\u00a0 While many residents described a caring community where \u201ceverybody knows everybody,\u201d the close-knit environment made\u00a0some people feel constantly under a microscope.\u00a0<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\nAfter talking with numerous individuals from the Poplar Grove community, Mueller and Abrutyn concluded\u00a0that the community\u2019s intense, close-knit social ties created\u00a0strong pressures for adolescents to conform to high\u00a0standards of excellence in things like sports and academics. This environment had created a pressure-cooker that drove some teenagers to suicide. While many residents described a warm, caring community where \u201ceverybody knows everybody,\u201d the darker side was that the close-knit environment made\u00a0some people feel constantly under a microscope. Some respondents reported that the individuals they knew who committed suicide achieved great popularity and academic success, but that their support networks also pressured them to maintain appearances and be “ideal citizens.” In Durkheim’s terms, these\u00a0high levels of social integration and moral regulation can create an environment conducive to “fatalistic” or “altruistic” suicides in which individuals commit suicide because they feel overwhelmed by the expectations of their tight-knit community. This is a troubling finding, and disrupts common assumptions that small towns and tight social networks are always and everywhere good for mental health and social relationships.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn, “Adolescents under Pressure: A New Durkeheimian Framework for Understanding Adolescent Suicide in a Cohesive Community,” American Sociological Review, 2016 In 1897, sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote one of the first empirical studies of population health with his book Suicide. Over a hundred years later, students still learn about suicide and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1957,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,33],"tags":[14907,1437,37334,9013,567],"class_list":["post-8680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-health","tag-sociology-of-culture","tag-durkheim","tag-health","tag-social-ties","tag-suicide"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8680"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8689,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8680\/revisions\/8689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/discoveries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}