The Idea of Suicide

Contagion, Imitation, and Cultural Diffusion

Michael J. Kral

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429676246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is about a new theory of suicide as cultural mimesis, or as an idea that is internalized from culture. Written as part of a new, critical focus in suicidology, this volume moves away from the dominant, strictly scientific understanding of suicide as the result of a mental disorder, and towards positioning suicide as an anthropologically salient, community-driven phenomenon. Written by a leading researcher in the field, this volume presents a conception of suicide as culturally scripted, and it demonstrates how suicide becomes a cultural idiom of distress that for some can become a normative option.

1
Introduction

Human Imitation as Culture

People have tried to understand suicide for a very long time. It has been studied by psychology, psychiatry, sociology, public health, and recently anthropology. Freud called suicide a riddle. It is indeed a puzzle. One frame to see suicide has been psychological, which Shneidman (1993) saw as extreme and unbearable psychological pain, what he called psych-ache, looking into the mind, phenomenologically. This view has been very productive. Pompili (2018) shows that there are four theoretical models of suicide: the scientific, determinist view such as mental illness causing suicide; the “cry for help” view where the person wants to reduce their distress; the sociogenic view, such as that of Durkheim who believed that social forces and society lead to suicide; and a stress-diathesis model where environmental stress interacts with a vulnerable individual. As James Hillman (1964, p. 16) asks about suicide, “How can one understand it? Why does one do it? Why does one not?” He calls suicide one of the human possibilities, where death can be chosen. There are a number of theories of suicide, but I refer to most of these as theories of perturbation, of distress. We have a long list of suicide risk factors, but they only mean that the person is upset, not suicidal. Most people with these risk factors are not suicidal. In this book a new theory of suicide is proposed. It is a cultural theory, seeing suicide as an idea internalized from culture by vulnerable people. We will turn to a view of culture as imitation, diffusion, and contagion, which will then lead to seeing suicide this way. Cheng, Hong, Silenzio, and Caine (2014) see imitation as the best explanation for suicide contagion.

Why do humans do what they do? Is much of what we do innate, something we were born with? Or are we tabula rasa, a blank slate, where everything we do is learned? Psychology has a very long history of looking into these questions, and the answer is usually both. We are born with certain features, and we learn a great deal. In this book we will see how much we actually learn from our environment, from our culture. We will see that most of what we do is culturally learned, and we learn from each other. Benedict (1953) called this cultural conditioning. Murray and Kluckhohn (1953) argued that all human behavior is culturally determined, as did Boas (2013/1910, p. 8), who wrote that behavior is determined “by the habitual reactions of the society to which the individual in question belongs.” We copy each other. How you hold and drink a cup of tea, how you speak to others, how you think about yourself, are all learned from our culture. We are culturally constructed beings. Let us begin with imitation as a way that culture works, as the way we learn most everything.

Imitation is something we all do, and have done all our lives. Imitation is how culture works. It makes us who we are. This book is about a new theory of suicide as cultural mimesis, as an idea that is internalized from culture and imitated (Kral, 1994, 1998). I wrote the first paper on this theory in 1994, when culture was not very much included in suicidology. That year I began a cultural study of suicide among Inuit in Arctic Canada, so culture was on my mind. I read the 1904 book Social Logic by Gabriele Tarde and began to think about suicide from the perspective of imitation. Once I thought of suicide in this way, I could not return to my old way of thinking of suicide as caused by risk factors and mental illness. I had never thought that before and had been working on suicide and suicide prevention for years. After that, I could no longer see suicide any other way. Suicide had a new image.

The understanding of suicide, or suicidology, is dominated by psychology and psychiatry, and is seen as individualized, narrowly focused on risk factors, caused by a mental disorder, and the study of it is strictly scientific, marked by positivist quantitative research (Marsh, 2010). Most of the research on suicide is focused on these factors and methods, and most theories of suicide also look at this. Suicidology is in the tradition of positivist/empiricist science. The individual focus is paramount. As Gould (1981, pp. 22–23) wrote,

Scientists can struggle to identify the cultural assumptions of their trade and to ask how answers might be formulated under different assertions. But science’s potential as an instrument for identifying the cultural constraints upon it cannot be fully realized until scientists give up the twin myths of objectivity and inexorable march toward truth. … The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.

What is interesting is that suicide as portrayed in the movies, which is common, is depicted as a social act, caused by social factors, the most predominant one being relationship strain (Stack & Bowman, 2012). Some researchers and clinicians have been questioning this individual and pathological stance of suicidology, wanting to expand into qualitative and ethnographic research, into understanding suicide from the person’s or a community’s point of view, seeing suicide from a cultural vantage point, and seeing suicide prevention from different angles such as being community-driven (Kral & Idlout, 2016). A new field of critical suicidology is emerging, questioning the status quo and providing new, innovative, and alternative perspectives on suicide and its prevention (White, Marsh, Kral, & Morris, 2016). This critical stance is not to replace the traditional work in suicidology, but to expand it. My book will fit into this new critical suicidology. My book will not be about suicide in different cultures per se, although I will present and discuss this. This book is anthropological, but also psychological. It is about how individuals internalize culture, how the mind and culture are constituted of each other. Suicide is seen as a social disorder. My book will fit with the newer look in anthropology on cultural transmission and the propagation of ideas (Bloch, 2005; Bentley, Earls, & O’Brien, 2011; Schönpflug, 2009a). We will better understand how suicide becomes an acceptable option by examining and studying the phenomenon of the idea. We need to learn more about how ideas are adopted more generally in the first place, how they are spread throughout society, and how they change over time.

Culture

The concept of culture should first be examined. What is culture? In anthropology the term has produced much debate. Burke (2005, p. 119) notes that the concept of culture has “an embarrassing variety of definitions.” The ambiguity of the culture concept has not been resolved (Stocking, 1992a). Shore (1996, p. 8) writes about anthropology’s use of culture, noting that “the concept of culture, long the defining idea of our discipline, is in deep trouble.” He notes that culture in anthropology has many meanings:

A patchwork of traits, integrated configurations, constellations of symbols and meanings, symbolic templates, a web of meanings, taxonomic trees, measurable units of behavior, a collection of material artifacts, systems of knowledge, sets of values and beliefs, sets of characteristic strategies for accomplishing a desired goal, and, more recently, a field on which a cacophonous cluster of diverse voices or “discourses” plays itself out.

He sees culture as “a very large and heterogeneous collection of models or what psychologists sometimes call schemas” (p. 44). These are knowledge structures (Casson, 1983). Schemas are developed in cultural contexts (Cerulo, 2002). Nishida (2005, pp. 402, 404) defines cultural schemas as “generalized collections of the knowledge that we store in memory through experiences in our own culture,” “a stock of knowledge of appropriate behavior and an appropriate role he or she should play in the situation.” Cultural schemas organize and process experience, and some anthropologists see cultural models as larger and more complex (Quinn, 2011). Bloch (2012) finds great similarity in the concepts of scripts, schemas, mental models, and cultural models. A schema is a memory structure (Derry, 1996). Schemas can have motivational properties and can organize desirable or undesirable states of mind (Horowitz & Stinson, 1995). Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) reviewed the various definitions of culture. They found 164 different definitions and wrote that “culture is an abstract description of trends toward uniformity in the words, acts, and artifacts of human groups” (in original) (p. 359). They cited the coming of the culture concept “as the foundation stone in the social sciences,” with the idea of culture being “one of the key notions of contemporary American thought” (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 3). The authors provided the following definition: “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may on the one hand be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action” (p. 357). Ross (2004, p. 68) has culture as shared meanings, as “the distribution of knowledge, ideas, and values.” For Bloch (2012, p. 33), culture is “the process of transmission through communication.” Culture can be essentialized, ignoring within-group differences and assuming that everyone is thinking the same way. Culture is, rather, a moving process. Biologist Richard Dawkins (2016, p. 4), author of The Selfish Gene, writes, “Some would say that culture is so important that genes, whether selfish or not, are virtually irrelevant to the understanding of human nature.”

Geertz (1973, p. 5) has culture as “webs of significance people have themselves spun,” where “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” Culture for Geertz is public because meaning is, and it is ideational. “Culture consists of socially established structures of meaning” (p. 12), “Cultural systems must have a minimal degree of coherence, [or] else we would not call them systems” (p. 17). “Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is” (p. 29). Culture for Geertz was a combination of core symbols, underlying structures, and ideologies. It was about knowing how people understand themselves (Rosaldo, 1999). Culture is indeed a shared meaning system, what people have in common, and even how people see themselves. Harari (2011) believes that cultures are the diversity of imagined realities, what he calls mythical glue, and that people are born into pre-existing imagined orders shaped by a culture’s dominant myths. Cultures “create imagined orders and devised scripts” (p. 149), an “intersubjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination” (p. 197). Even though their culture has changed significantly, the Inuit in Arctic Canada I have worked with for over 20 years still see themselves as having a culture that is different from mainstream Canadian culture. This is referred to as cultural identity. Oyserman and Lee (2007, p. 272) write that “culture matters, influencing how the self is defined, how relationships with others are imagined, what is of value and worth, and how the mind works.” Tolman (1998) corrected Descartes with sumus ergo sum, we are therefore I am, rather than cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), seeing the person becoming a person in a public space. As Floyd Allport (1924, p. 325) wrote some time ago, “My idea of myself is thus largely my neighbor’s idea of me, or rather my own idea of my neighbor’s idea of me.” In 1895, Le Bon wrote about crowds, which he believed were unconscious and prone to “contagious suggestion” (Le Bon, 1960/1895, p. 41). He argued that emotions are contagious, and “Contagion is so powerful that it forces upon individuals not only certain opinions, but certain modes of feeling as well” (p. 128), and “Man, like animals, has a natural tendency to imitation” (p. 127).

The diversity of “imagined realities” resulting in the diversity of behavior, as well as the myths and fictions we learn from birth on, thinking in certain ways, learning certain rules of life, are fundamental aspects of culture (Harari, 2011, p. 41). Psychological processes are constituted by culture (Richardson & Fowers, 2010). Indeed, culture mediates our existence (Teo, 2017). Culture, according to Sperber (1996a), is made up of contagious ideas. To explain culture, he argues, is to explain how some ideas become contagious. He calls this the epidemiology of representations, the distribution of mental states in a population (Droit & Sperber, 1999). This is after Durkheim’s notion of collective representations. What is linked are the public and the mental, again the co-constitution of culture and mind. Markus and Hamedani (2007, pp. 4–5) note that “as people actively construct their worlds, they are made up of, or ‘constituted by,’ relations with other people and by the ideas, practices, products, and institutions that are prevalent in their social contexts (i.e., environments, fields, situations, settings, worlds). … Individuals are ineluctably social and cultural phenomena.” Some cultural representations in the mind are useful, and others are harmful. Very similar representations are distributed in a population. Representations are internalized psychologically, and internalization will be described in detail in Chapter 4. The self is culturally shaped, as seen in comparisons between North American and Asian people (Kitayama, Duffy, & Uchida, 2007). Culture affects emotions (Anderson, 2011; Mesquita & Leu, 2007), moral development (Miller, 2007; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1990), social identity, (Brewer & Yuki, 2007), and memory (Bloch, 2012; Wang & Ross, 2007), and it is critical in shaping the onset, experience, expression, course, and outcome of mental disorders (Marsella & Yamada, 2007). Culture even shapes our posture and stance (Mead, 1972). Culture shapes how we develop as children (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen, 1992; Gardiner, 2001). It shapes how we think (Goodnow, 1990; Kashima, 2001; Nisbett, 2003), how we are motivated to do things (D’Andrade & Strauss, 1992; Munro, Schumaker, & Carr, 1997), and how identity and the self exist (Allen, 1997; Markus, Mullally, & Kitayama, 1997). The self is seen as social, as relational (Gergen, 2011). Fivush and Buckner (1997) see the self itself as a social-cultural process. Martin and Sugarman (1999, p. 32) see that

selves need societies, just as societies need selves. A psychological being develops a self only because it is part of a community of other selves, past and present, that has constructed a public, social world of common symbols, systems, and practices capable of underwriting a pattern of interactions in which selves influence and respond to other selves.

Suicide Contagion

Rather that treating suicide contagion and clusters as a form of (tragic) error variance, to use statistical language, I believe that the social and cultural influence on suicide should be seen as a main effect. It tells us a great deal about the phenomenon of suicide. To be sure, the media reporting prevention efforts by the CDC and others are to be commended (Pirkis, Blood, Beautrais, Burgess, & Skehan, 2006). But they actually get at the heart of the matter, that suicide is a socially contagious phenomenon in general. Human meaning is collective (Baumeister & Landau, 2018). The meaning of suicide is thus collective, spread socially. Suicide can be “normalized” by the media and other sources (SAMHSA, 2017). Chu, Goldblum, Floyd, and Bongar (2010) write about attitudes they call cultural sanctions, and they add that culture contributes to suicide through the suicidal behavior of close others and one’s own attitudes and behavior concerning suicide. Suicide by cluster and contagion may be at the center of understanding this phenomenon. Cheng et al. (2014) found 340 academic articles on suicide contagion between 1960 and 2013, so there has been much interest in this phenomenon. Exposure to suicides of others increases one’s likelihood of being suicidal (Swanson & Colman, 2013). Even biologically oriented suicidologists mention the imitative and contagious aspect of suicide (e.g., Jamison, 1999), yet it remains to be theorized within the field.

In my theory of suicide, presented in Chapter 4, suicide is seen as a function of two factors: perturbation and lethality. Perturbation means being upset, anxious, depressed, irritated, shaken, angry, guilty, shamed, and so on. Lethality in my view is the idea of suicide, the idea of death to stop the perturbation. This book is about a lethality theory of suicide. Lethality is the killer. It is the intentionality and singularity of suicide as an option to end perturbation. It involves selecting the permanent cessation of consciousness as the escape plan. It is the adoption of suicide as an idea, as a plan of action. Perturbation does not cause suicide, although most suicidologists think it does. Crossing one’s threshold of tolerance for perturbation is usually believed to be the most important precursor to suicide (Menninger, 1938; Motto, 1992). Perturbation acts as motivation when a threshold of tolerance is crossed. It is argued here that perturbation can never be more than an indirect cause of suicide. It causes us to do something about the perturbation. While we have learned much about perturbation, we still know little about lethality. And where do we get most of our ideas? We get them from our cultural surround. We get them from other people. It is my view, based on the early theory of sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1903, 1904), that the sharing of ideas is how culture works. We imitate each other; we imitate role models. The second factor in the theory is that suicide is an idea internalized from culture. Imitation is a form of cultural learning. Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner (1993, p. 497) see imitative learning as “the learner internalizes something of the demonstrator’s behavioral strategies.” Infants imitate already when they are a few hours old (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1983). We grow up in a culture where we internalize almost everything we do, and even who we are. We are socially constructed (Gergen, 1999, 2001). We acquire ideas about suicide from our culture. As Hacking (1999) writes, ideas “inhabit a social setting” (p. 10). The reasons for and of suicide vary widely around the world, yet are shared by people living close to each other. Anthropologists have long noted difference in suicide methods across societies, sometimes being quite “stereotyped and distinctive” (La Fontaine, 1975, p. 81). Suicide is culturally scripted; it becomes a cultural idiom of distress that for some can become a normative option (Nichter, 2010). Winterrowd, Canetto, and Benoit (2015) found that suicide among the elderly in America is culturally acceptable because of physical illness, and this attitude becomes a cultural script for suicide among the elderly.

Servitje and Nixon (2016) find that contagion is endemic to contemporary culture and has been part of human history for centuries. There is now even a neurobiology of imitation in mirror neurons, a system that understands actions of others and replicates those actions, neurons that fire when an action is seen and also performed (Iacoboni et al., 1999; Rizzolatti, 2005; Wohlschlager & Bekkering, 2002). The mirror neuron system is about understanding actions performed by others (Rizzolatti, 2005). Neuronal “activity is triggered not only by the observation of an action but also by the sound produced by that action. … This otherness with which we are saturated and that constitutes us is the human condition” (Oughourlian, 2016, pp. 27, 45). The other becomes a model. Ideas are out there in public in social settings. Ideas can become normative. Norms are both ideational and behavioral, as in behavioral regularities seen collectively as appropriate. Norms can be internalized and become an “oughtness,” something that should be done. Some norms are more accepted than others. Norms are more likely to be internalized if they are ambiguous or vague, allowing for flexibility in choice (Hechter & Opp, 2001). As Wedenoja and Sobo (1997, p. 162) state, “Culture is knowledge that is shared or public … virtually everything we think or do involves culture.” Imitation is important for an understanding of the ecology of human cognition and norms, the mutual influence of cognition and culture (Hurley & Chater, 2005b). The effects of imitation can be seen in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which is a set of dispositions, knowledge, and understandings of the world, that is created through socialization (Mahar, Harker, & Wilkes, 1990). Even O’Dea (1882) over a century ago thought that suicide was imitated.

Bandura (2001) has discussed social learning theory and social diffusion. This theory sees people as agentic, as self-organizing, proactive, and self-regulating, and has the proposition that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating. People can direct themselves. They model their behavior after others, and this modeling is furthered through the mass media. They are motivated by pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Human Imitation as Culture
• 2 On Suicide
• 3 Social Epidemics
• 4 Culture and Suicide
• 5 Cultural Mimesis in Suicide: A Return to Diffusion and Gabriel Tarde
• 6 Afterword
• References
• Index