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Book Review: Elder suicide: Durkheim’s vision

We reviewed this recently published book, Elder Suicide: Durkheim’s Vision by Stephen M. Marson, as a wife and husband team academically engaged with human physiology interests and gerontology wellness projects. Hence, our approach to understanding the world through science involves quantifiable metrics and (computable) mathematical relationships. Biomedical research often involves frameworks of competing and fleeting hypotheses that do not last past a few funding cycles. By contrast, this book draws on a theory of suicide published over 122 years ago, yet still provides a powerful framework for analysis and therapy in the context of today’s rapidly changing evidence-based human research. The goal of Elder Suicide: Durkheim’s Vision is to enhance the knowledge base, awareness, and potential opportunities for practitioners to work with older adults to uncover challenges with social and physical changes that can lead to suicide. Ultimately, the author expresses the hope of creating more comprehensive, preventive, and personalized treatment options for the world’s aging population. The text has seven chapters and over 500 references and provides an expansive consideration of suicide for older persons, while managing to offer case-study detail in each of the four Durkheim focus environments. Marson opens with a preface to introduce Emile Durkheim’s background and explain the importance and relevance of his work to gerontology. Emile Durkheim (1858– 1917) was a French sociologist who is recognized to have formally established the academic discipline of sociology, together with W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, and is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science. He proposed that society is a reality unique to itself and irreducible to its composing parts, created when individual consciences interact together to create a synthetic reality that is completely new and greater than the sum of its parts. This new reality can be understood in sociological terms, but cannot be reduced to psychological or biological explanations. Durkheim claimed that human societies could be studied scientifically with a methodology focused on “social facts,” or elements of collective life that exist independently of, and are able to exert influence on, individuals. Chapter 1 relates Durkheim’s Suicide to modern 21stcentury gerontology practice. The author proposes that balance between theory and empiricism is the best platform for social intervention. Marson’s book illustrates how Durkheim’s work provides a rational framework for treading through the incoherent jumble of data in the area of older adult self-maltreatment. Durkheim described four environments that create suicide potential: fatalistic, anomic, egoistic, and altruistic. He then proceeded to present a world view composed of figuratively two exclusive dimensions by linking related but opposite environments as ordinal data types with order, but not necessarily equal unit intervals. The social environment represented by these opposites, fatalistic– anomic and egoistic–altruistic, become a springboard for many suicides when individuals are at the extremes. Unfortunately, these dimensions are relative, preventing nominal data analysis familiar to quantitative researchers, but the dimensions provide a framework for practitioners to guide social history recording and intervention strategy. Chapter 1 presents a case history for illustration, along with discussion regarding rights to self-determination. There is also an interesting, yet unexpected, reflection about post 9/11 research of suicidal patterns among terrorists, which elaborates on the dynamic nature of mental states that affect movement along Durkheim’s four axes. In considering specific social environments and practices, Chapters 2 through 5 separately cover the four Durkheim types of suicide. Each of these chapters is liberally furnished with illustrative figures, case histories, and thoroughly referenced throughout. Chapter 2 covers fatalistic suicide where the person is confronted with a social environment in which there is little to no change in role expectations. The author states that fatalistic suicide may be the most common form among older adults, even though Durkheim presented only anecdotal evidence for this aspect of his hypothesis. Chapter 3 covers anomic suicide, where the social structure is dominated by social rules for which the individual could not gain familiarity or could not keep pace with rapid changes in those rules. A balance between fatalistic and anomic social environment is conducive to homeostasis of the individual, 898303 JAGXXX10.1177/0733464819898303Journal of Applied GerontologyBook Review book-review2020