Essay On Military Suicide

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Recommended: Relevance of Durkheim's theory of suicide

One of the more shocking and disturbing facts related to the fallout of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is this: the number of suicides among the US active duty military personnel has now surpassed the number of troops killed in battle (Williams.) That number reflects the fact that essentially 22 soldiers killed themselves every day, or one every 65 minutes. This troubling trend has been rising since 2005. In addition, the suicide rate of military members in the US is twice as high as it was before the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. There have been many social scientists that have developed ideas about what causes people to commit suicide: individual dynamics, social factors, or a combination of both. Emile Durkheim, in his landmark work regarding suicide, developed four different categories of suicide: fatalistic, egoistic, anomic and altruistic. This paper will discuss the issue of suicides among the military, using the framework of Durkheim’s theory of suicide, and focusing on the fatalistic, egoistic, and anomic categories to explain this alarming phenomenon.
Durkheim’s theory of suicide illustrated his approach as a positivist theorist; he was a strong believer that sociology should be studied scientifically in a way that those utilized by other natural sciences in order to establish the field as a credible one. Essentially, this involved the establishment of cause-and-effect associations using hypothetical and deductive reasoning. In his study of suicide, Durkheim attempted to explain how the field of sociology could uniquely describe elements of society and human behavior in a way that differed from that offered by other disciplines. His beliefs regarding suicide involved his conviction that suicide may happen as...

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... to this population that are specific to this group. The result has been an alarming rise in suicide, caused by a multitude of factors but which can be explained by Durkheim’s framework for suicide: fatalism, anomie, and egoism, all of which leave these vulnerable troops and veterans at high risk for harming themselves. As Durkheim described, these troops are vulnerable to engaging in egoistic suicide because of their feelings of detachment from people and society as a whole; fatalistic suicide because of their vast experiences witnessing death and injury; and anomic suicide because of a sense that the structure of society has become chaotic based on what they have experienced in the theater of combat as well is coming home to a world filled with unemployment, personal and financial stress, and a lack of resources necessary to address the problems of the military.

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