ALCOHOL AND SUICIDE: SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Relevance: Sociology : Thinkers: Durkheim; G.S paper I: Society and social issues
CONTEXT
Five people with an alleged history of alcohol addiction have committed suicide — five days into the lockdown in Kerala — and reports point to the health woes of alcohol addicts building up into a major concern on the sidelines of the battle against COVID-19 across the state.
While Kerala has seen restrictions on liquor in various ways in the past, this is the first time that total prohibition has come into effect in the state due to the lockdown.
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
APPLICATION OF DURKHEMIAN CONCEPT OF SUICIDE TO THE PRESENT STUDY
Durkheim’s theory of suicide has long been the dominant influence on the sociological study of suicide.
But studies of suicide within the Durkheimian tradition have been discontinuous, preventing cumulative theoretical advance. The discontinuity is partly due to researchers’ failure to base their work on a comprehensive, inter subjective interpretation of Suicide.
Durkheim’s theory gets strong empirical support. Marital-familial status and sex, which he treated in an ad hoc, post-factum way are more important in the study of Suicide.
According to Durkheim societies can be abnormal as well, such that the level of integration can be below or above the level of normative regulation.
Durkheim’s regulation and integration makes it possible to see an analytic distinction between the four forms of suicide.
Durkheim’s use of the theories of both egoism and anomie to explain familial suicide rates forces consideration of a particularly vexing problem in the theoretical interpretation of suicide, the relationship between egoism and anomie.
Integration as the extent of social relations binding a person or a group to others such that they are exposed to the moral demands of the group. Integration may vary from complete embeddedness in a group, the fully connected clique to the pure isolate without social relations. Regulation is defined as the normative or moral demands placed on the individual that come with membership in a group.
Durkheim postulated that egoistic suicide results when society fails to integrate the individual in to its fold, while anomic suicide is the consequence of the failure of society to regulate and maintain integration of the individual, leading to normlessness and a sense of alienation.
Durkheim also described the altruistic type of suicide occurring in traditional societies though he later extended it to non-traditional ones.
Egoistic suicide ensues when the individual finds life to be meaningless, while altruistic suicide occurs when death appears meaningful. Thus, egoism is defined in the limit as the absence of social relations within a given society, and altruism by the total presence of relations.
Egoistic suicide is the suicide of the highly individuated modern man. The altruist kills himself because he is unhappy, but this unhappiness is distinctive both in its causes and in its effects. While the egoist is unhappy because he sees nothing “real” in the world besides himself.
The altruist is sad because the individual seems every thing “unreal”. The egoist sees no goal to which he might commit himself, and thus feels useless and without purpose while the altruist commits himself to a goal beyond this world, when world itself is an obstacle and burden to him.
Fatalism is a state opposite to anomie in which social regulation is completely instilled in the individual and there is no hope of change against the oppressive discipline of the society. The only way for the individual to be released from this state is to commit suicide.
Fatalistic suicide occurs where this regulatory power of norms is “anchored in an authority external to the social aggregate as a whole and to each individual in it vested”.
Thus the four types of suicide can be differentiated, each from every other, in terms of oppositions on at least one of the three major dimensions viz the existence of norms, their content, and their effective source of regulatory power.
The present study shows Durkheim’s these typologies relevant in Kerala scenario too.
Here the study shows that the cause of suicide is different from that of Durkheim.
Several factors like alcoholism, marital conflicts, and failure in love, low social support and poor relation with family members also cause of suicide in Kerala too.
One clear difference between present study and Durkheim study is that in the latter indirect causes are as important as direct causes. Alcohol and suicide Sociologists have taken little interest in alcohol abuse as a possible antecedent of suicide.
However, a theoretical link between the two phenomena can be postulated that is consistent with Durkheim’s suicide theory.
According to the findings, one third of the male suicides are attributable to the alcohol factor.
The impact of unemployment, family problems and occasional drinking are also found to be fairly strong, and here the indirect effects seem to be at least as important as the direct ones.
Just as a sociological perspective is relevant for understanding the genesis of alcohol abuse, so can its consequences (including suicide risk) be approached sociologically and more specifically, it seems possible to postulate a theoretical link between alcohol abuse and suicide which is consistent with Durkheim [1897] well-known assertion that the suicide rate is inversely related to the degree of social integration.
By social integration, here referring to the extent and quality of interpersonal relations, there is much to suggest that alcohol abuse has disintegrating effects.
This study observed that as noted above alcohol induced tend to dilute the social network. In addition, it may assume a hostile or disapproving attitude from society at large toward alcohol abuse which may worsen the prospects of heavy drinkers to become socially integrated.
The excessive drinkers were poorly integrated, having deficient social networks. It is recognized that alcoholics have inferior capability for social interaction prior to the onset of alcoholism.
They had little or no social support, enjoyed poor relationships with spouses, children and friends and this was typically a result of the subjects’ alcohol abuse.
Alcohol abuse tends to induce aggressive, reckless behaviour that increases the risk of losing personal ties, i.e., leads to weaker social network and perceived low social support among them.
The study shows that the alcoholism of male members shook the family relations. The socialization pattern of family negatively affected due to parental alcoholism.
The diagram shows alcoholism causes lack of integration to family and creates anomic situation which may cause suicide. Due to alcoholism male members behave in an irresponsible manner in family matters.
Most of them had made sound financial burden to the whole family which gradually weakened the family ties.
The study shows men often commit suicide after their marriage, sometimes after a long period of alcoholism when they have alienated themselves from their friends and relatives by their conduct.
They are the ones who are estranged from their children and who find themselves in a state of solitude and low social support, which sooner or latter ends in suicide.
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