The reliance on official government statistics to study ‘Suicide’ has been successfully attacked by J.B. Douglas, especially in Emile Durkheim’s 1976 work that analyzes its “social meaning”. In its most famous treatment, it was concluded that incidences of this are highest in areas of social disintegration.
That same analysis divided ‘Suicide’ into four types, two of which, egoistic and altruistic, have a common source in strong personal value-systems, in contrast to the other two types, fatalistic and anomic.
