Mueller Anna S, Abrutyn Seth, Pescosolido Bernice, Diefendorf Sarah
Department of Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, United States.
Department of Sociology, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2021 Mar 31;12:621569. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.621569. eCollection 2021.
The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world. These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide and strategies to prevent it. Unfortunately, despite making significant contributions to the founding of suicidology - through Emile Durkheim's classic Suicide (1897/1951) - sociology's role has been less prominent in contemporary efforts to address these tragic trends, though as we will show, sociological theories offer great promise for advancing our understanding of suicide and improving the efficacy of suicide prevention. Here, we review sociological theory and empirical research on suicide. We begin where all sociologists must: with Durkheim. However, we offer a more comprehensive understanding of Durkheim's insights into suicide than the prior reviews provided by those in other disciplines. In so doing, we reveal the nuance and richness of Durkheim's insights that have been largely lost in modern suicidology, despite being foundational to all sociological theories of suicide - even those that have moved beyond his model. We proceed to discuss broadly acknowledged limitations to Durkheim's theory of suicide and review how more recent theoretical efforts have not only addressed those concerns, but have done so by bringing a larger swatch of sociology's theoretical and empirical toolkit to bare on suicide. Specifically, we review how recent sociological theories of suicide have incorporated insights from social network theories, cultural sociology, sociology of emotions, and sociological social psychology to better theorize how the external social world matters to individual psychological pain and suffering. We conclude by making explicit bridges between sociological and psychological theories of suicide; by noting important limitations in knowledge about suicide - particularly regarding the roles of organizations, inequality, and intersectionality in suicide - that sociology is well situated to help address.
在过去20年里，美国及世界其他国家的自杀率急剧上升。这些趋势已被认定为一场急需新解决方案的公共卫生危机，并促使人们开展了大量研究工作，以增进我们对自杀行为的理解以及预防自杀的策略。不幸的是，尽管社会学通过埃米尔·涂尔干的经典著作《自杀论》（1897/1951年）为自杀学的创立做出了重大贡献，但在当代应对这些悲惨趋势的努力中，社会学的作用却不那么突出。不过，正如我们将展示的那样，社会学理论为深化我们对自杀行为的理解以及提高自杀预防的成效提供了巨大潜力。在此，我们回顾关于自杀的社会学理论和实证研究。我们从所有社会学家都必须开始的地方着手：以涂尔干为起点。然而，我们对涂尔干关于自杀的见解提供了比其他学科的先前综述更为全面的理解。通过这样做，我们揭示了涂尔干见解的细微差别和丰富性，这些在现代自杀学中大多已被忽视，尽管它们是所有自杀社会学理论的基础——甚至那些超越其模型的理论也是如此。我们接着讨论涂尔干自杀理论广泛认可的局限性，并回顾最近的理论努力不仅如何解决了这些问题，而且是如何通过运用社会学更大范围的理论和实证工具来研究自杀做到这一点的。具体而言，我们回顾最近的自杀社会学理论如何纳入了社会网络理论、文化社会学、情感社会学和社会心理社会学的见解，以便更好地从理论上说明外部社会世界如何影响个体心理痛苦。我们通过明确建立自杀社会学理论与心理学理论之间的联系来得出结论；通过指出关于自杀的知识存在的重要局限性——特别是关于组织、不平等和交叉性在自杀中的作用——而社会学有能力帮助解决这些问题。
