Durkheim on Suicide

As a psychology major, suicide has a lot to do with the field that I'm going into and what I want to study further, so of course I'm going to pick suicide to blog about. I agree with Durkheim when he states that the purpose of even studying suicide in the first place is to make it a sociological phenomenon and not just a personal choice. There are so many outside factors and pressures that drive a person to commit suicide. The pressure to fit in, the pressure to get good grades as a student, the pressure to make some kind of meaning out of your life, people constantly badgering you about everything and anything. The outside world puts a lot of stress on someone which can cause them to become mentally unstable and even consider suicide. There are four different kinds of suicide we could talk about: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. Egoistic is basically where you consider yourself an outsider and you don't fit in. And if you don't fit in anywhere, you're probably going to get bullied and harassed, causing one to feel so ashamed of themselves that they believe their life isn't worth living anymore. Altruistic is where you feel so strongly towards a certain society or group, that you would be willing to die for them. This is true of soldiers who go to war and they know they're going to die, but they keep on going anyways. This type of suicide could be considered more heroic or novel though because they aren't dying for themselves, they're dying for their country. Anomic is where there is very low regulation causing people to go from being stable to unstable. An example of that could be during the recession in the US. Before the recession, people had good jobs and they were for the most part financially stable, and then they wake up the next morning and bam, there job is gone. They lost all of their pay and salary and now have no way to pay the bills or go to the doctor if they're sick. Such an enormous change of pace in life doesn't settle in well for a lot of people causing them to end their lives. The last one is fatalistic suicide, where there is too much regulation, take for instance a prison. It is human nature to want to be free, and people aren't able to live well when someone has so much control over their life. When they can't do what they want, when they want, they question the point of living. People don't just wake up and decide they want to commit suicide and end their life for no reason at all. There is a lot of outside factors and stress that just builds up until a person can no longer tear it down and gives up. Because of things that have happened in their life that seem like they cannot be fixed, they commit suicide. The video I have posted posted  is about a teenager who was suicidal because she lost her mom to suicide at age 9.  Suicide is not just a personal choice, it is a sociological phenomenon that not everyone recovers from.