Durkheim define suicide  as an act that leads to death either directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act perpetrated or committed by the victims themselves. Durkheim study of suicide “Le suicide” was the first methodological study of a social fact in the context of society. It is ostensibly a case study of suicide

According to Durkheim , suicide comes in four types, which are based on the degrees of imbalance of two social forces: social integration and moral regulation. Durkheim noted the effects of various crises on social aggregates—war, for example, leading to an increase in altruism, economic boom or disaster contributing to anomie.

Four Types of suicide

Egoistic suicide

• It refers to prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being integrated in a community. It results from the suicide’s sense that they have no tether. This absence can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression.
• Durkheim calls such detachment “excessive individuation.” Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and were therefore more likely to die by suicide.
• Durkheim found that suicide occurred more often among unmarried people, especially unmarried men, whom he found had less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals.

Altruistic suicide 

• It is characterized by a sense of being overwhelmed by a group’s goals and beliefs.
• It occurs in societies with high integration, where individual needs are seen as less important than the society’s needs as a whole.
• They thus occur on the opposite integration scale as egoistic suicide.
• As individual interest would not be considered important, Durkheim stated that in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to die by suicide.
• He described one exception: when the individual is expected to kill themself on behalf of society, for example in military service. Individual is overly attached to the society.

Anomic suicide

• It reflects an individual’s moral confusion and lack of social direction, which is related to dramatic social and economic upheaval.
• It is the product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and order on the individual conscience.
• This is symptomatic of a failure of economic development and division of labour to produce Durkheim’s organic solidarity. People do not know where they fit within their societies.

Fatalistic suicide

• It occurs when a person is excessively regulated, when their futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline.
• It is the opposite of anomic suicide, and occurs in societies so oppressive their inhabitants would rather die than live on. For example, some prisoners might prefer to die than live in a prison with constant abuse and excessive regulation.
• Unlike the other concepts he developed, Durkheim believed that fatalistic suicide was theoretical and probably did not exist in reality.