Anne Cleary - The Gendered Landscape of Suicide: Masculinities, Emotions, and Culture

Anne Cleary

The Gendered Landscape of Suicide Masculinities, Emotions, and Culture

Throughout history and across many cultures, men have been far more likely to take their own lives and in modern society, blue collar, less educated men are especially at risk. In this important new study of men who want to, try to and do commit suicide, the sociologist Anne Cleary discovers underlying feelings of anguish, desperation, and shame. Equally important, she astutely observes that as men they feel obliged to bravely cover such feelings from public view. This misplaced notion of male valor, she persuasively argues, has tragically escaped public notice, seen as just how men are and foreclosed the possibility of receiving vitally needed help. An important contribution to sociology and a revelatory book for policy-makers, men at risk of their male socializationand everyone else.

Professor Arlie R. Hochschild, Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley

For David

Suicide has been identified by the World Health Organisation (: 345 ) and helps to explain the relationship between the person and his/her society. This is an important objective of sociology and of this book which explores how social and emotional issues are implicated in suicidal action.

Although suicide appears to be a clear and conclusive action, defining a death as suicide is problematic and this has significant implications for research in the area. Suicide is only categorised as such when there is clear intent and this is generally only possible to confirm from written information left by the deceased and or the lethality of the method used. Notes are left by a minority of those who kill themselves (ODonnell et al. ) noted, suicide is rarely circumscribed by the precise moment when it is accomplished.

The meaning of suicide is contested across cultures and time because suicide is a culturally constructed act performed in the context of a cultural system of meaning ( Counts ) demonstrates in her study of suicide in Russia . Explanations for a reputed epidemic of suicides in nineteenth-century Russia centred on the rise of secularisation while in the twentieth century the Soviet Government cast rising rates of suicide as a residue of the old bourgeois order (ibid.: 15).

Culture exerts a considerable influence on suicide rates particularly in terms of the societys overall attitude or script in relation to suicide . Western society, operating within a similar religious milieu, has tended to label suicide as deviant either in a religious, social, or psychological sense but there are societies where suicide is condoned or even valorized. There are also cultures where ambiguous attitudes to suicide exist, where the practice is permitted in certain circumstances. This can occur in societies where suicide is strongly prohibited and disguised forms of suicide are required to transform the deed into a positive action or into a feat of individual or political bravery. Political hunger strikes in Ireland and the practice of Jihad in Muslim culture are examples of this practice (Andriolo ). Cultural ideas are interwoven with beliefs about gender and class and these factors have an important influence on suicide patterns .

Since the twentieth century, mental illness has become the dominant paradigm for understanding suicide. Within the biomedical framework suicide results primarily from mental illness, particularly depression , but social factors are increasingly cited in these explanations to address high levels of suicide outside the clinical domain ( Hamdi et al. ) Le Suicide in the late nineteenth century and there were some important studies in the 1960s and 1970s but thereafter sociological interest in the topic decreased.

Sociological understanding of suicide began in the nineteenth century with Durkheims () analysis of the phenomenon and Le Suicide remains one of the best known and most referenced texts on this topic. His choice of subject was deliberate in that he sought to challenge the prevailing nineteenth-century view of suicide as shaped by personal factors including mental illness. Durkheims aim was to move the explanatory framework for suicide from the individual to the group and in this way establish the credentials of the emerging discipline of sociology. He used national statistical data, newly introduced in Europe, to map suicide patterns across nations and explained variations in terms of sociocultural factors . Durkheim focused on suicide rates which he believed were social facts reflecting suicidogenic currents or trends in a society. He proposed that each society had a specific tendency towards suicide which is a function of collective consciousness, social relationships and the shared beliefs that bind people together. According to Durkheim the collective tendencies in a society towards suicide dominate the consciousness of individuals and these currents are variously felt across a society. He developed four types of suicide anomic, egoistic, altruistic and fatalisticwhich he maintained were symptomatic of different types of social structure. He attributed egoistic suicide to lack of integration within a society and altruistic suicide to over-integration; anomic suicide as representative of a society lacking regulation and fatalistic suicide to over-regulation in society. His central thesis was that societies require a critical level of integration and or regulation to provide protection from suicide. When levels of integration or regulation are too low, or too high, members of the society lack the necessary social rules or goals, their social-psychological identity is impaired and the most vulnerable among them commit suicide. He examined factors such as the family and religion and concluded that suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the religious and domestic groups of which the individual forms a part. He theorised that Catholics were members of a more integrated religion and therefore had lower rates of suicide than Protestants and that family membership also conferred protection from suicide.