SOCIOLOGY

Sociology

Sociology

Introduction

Suicide implies a great deal of suffering, for survivors and for persons who think about taking their lives. This is also present during the process leading to suicide that is suicidal thoughts, attempts and completed suicide. In 1.600 years it has been forbidden to talk about suicide leading to underdevelopment of knowledge and a scanty language. The issue of suicide therefore evokes a lot of affections. As it happens with other topics, it also stirs controversy, sometimes polarization, between schools of thought and disciplines. For example, there are those who hail Emile Durkheim, the founder of Sociology, as the most classical of suicidologists, and those who disregard his contributions on grounds of what they interpret as “his baseless dismissal of mental illness as a key determinant of suicidal behaviour” (Durkheim 1897, Robertson 2006). It is not unknown for doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and educationalists to miss and dismiss important information just because it comes from the social sciences, as much as it is for social scientists to question what they call a disease model of individualistic approaches and positivistic science associated with medicine and psychology. Mutual rejection makes meaningful dialog impossible.

How a community deals with suicide?

Power struggles between disciplines can make us forget who should be the beneficiary of our interventions. In the Safe Communities Movement we believe that the beneficiaries should not only be individuals but communities, and that there are no better authorities than the communities themselves. And we are also convinced that usually there is no one is more willing to help with the healing processes than those near the victims. “Ordinary” citizens and community members, be they social workers, priests, teachers, rescue workers, the police, local leaders, parents and family, friends, or conditional experts, have a lot to say about suicide and suicide victims as they are the ones closest to a shared painful reality and more in contact with actual communities and individuals. Regardless of theoretical constructs we have much to learn from them, mostly because they are perceived by most members of communities as being their equals, and not as someone whose behaviour is highly determined by professional structures. In general all professionals and health professionals, in particular, usually approach others by telling them what to do, i.e. moving from a relationship of sharing and teaching (which conforms to the etymology of the Latin word doctor, meaning teacher) to sometimes one of overbearing. This does not necessarily define health or other professions; it just speaks of an accepted conformity, a result of which professionals of different disciplines end up excluding (excluding others and excluding themselves). Those that should be accompanied and consoled are instead patronized, ignored or just not helped. To regard a person as a victim increases passivity.

To regard her as an actor increases her capacity to solve difficult problems. Traditional critics of medicine that extend from Durkheim himself at the beginning of the 20th century to Ivan Illich, Thomas Mc Keown and René Dubos, among others, have pointed out how medicine could ...