Durkheim Starts SUICIDE by pointing out that suicide is, within a general range, a fairly stable fact of societies.  If you plot the suicide rate (that is, the number of suicide per 100,000 inhabitants) of any society over time shows a remarkable stability of the number of people committing suicide each year. In fact, the suicide number is more stable (that is, has fewer fluctuations over time) than the mortality rate (see figure.) However, in all societies, as well as in the U.S., there is a slow linear increase in the suicide rate over time. This is true for the aggregate and for the trend in subgroups of societies: say, among women
vs. men, blacks vs. whites, poor vs. rich, and so on.

How are we to make sense of this stability of the suicide rate within any given society or subgroup? While suicide is an individual act, Durkheim argues that the suicide RATE is a social fact - something that is external to any individual.  It is a product of the social structure of any given society.  Durkheim figured that by examining the different types of suicide, he could identify key elements of social organization.
 

The two key dimensions for understanding suicide are the extent of social INTEGRATION and REGULATION.

Integration is the extent of social relations binding a person or a group to others, such that they are exposed to the moral demands of the group
Regulation is defined as the normative or moral demands placed on the individual that come with membership in a group.
(Bearman, 1992, p.503).

These two dimensions, as we will see, underlie EDs development of EGOISTIC, ALTRUISTIC, ANOMIC and FATALISTIC types of suicide.
 

The argument:
The differences in the suicide rate between religious communities cannot be attributed to dogmatic differences: suicide is a sin in Protestant denominations as well as among Catholics and Jews. However, there are differences in terms of embeddedness in religious communities. The movement away from Catholicism is one away from a tight hierarchy, from faith, and from rituals which continually reconfirm the embeddedness in the community. In contrast, the practice of Protestantism does not insist strongly on membership in the community, with the exception of Anglicans, who are more similar to Catholics in terms of rituals and embeddedness and, accordingly, have a similar suicide rate. Jews, on the other hand, have a rich ritual life within a tightly knit community and a pronounced hierarchy, which contributes to a low suicide rate among them.  While minorities might be better protected from suicide by virtue of closer social relations forced by the potentially hostile majority--the pattern of lower suicide rates among Catholics holds, however, even where they are in the majority.

He thus finds three facts:

1. Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society

Jews < Catholics < Protestants
 
2. Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of domestic society

Married < Unmarried
 
3. Suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of political society

Rural < Urban
Wartime < Peacetime
1848 < other times

From these data, Durkheim identified the first type of suicide, namely "Egoistic" suicide, that occurs among people who are not deeply embedded (i.e. integrated) in communities.  Importantly, in combining the view of the Division of Labor w. the argument of Suicide, these are modern people, people in a market economy.  We can represent these people as having loose ties to others.

Societies with a developed division of labor and a high degree of functional integration are characterized by organic solidarity. Functional interdependence between people is motivated by economic exchange, however, which does not necessarily yield embeddedness in social relations.  In the extreme, people are so heterogeneous that they are not members of any group.
 

Altruistic Suicide

Here ED discusses a different type of Suicide.  Namely that found among "primitive" people.  He says that:

    "Suicide,..., is surely very common among primitive peoples.  But it displays peculiar characteristics.  All the facts reported above fall into one of the following three categories:

Suicides of men on the threshold of old age or stricken w. sickness

Suicides of women on their husband's death

Suicides of followers or servants on the death of their chief

Now, when a person kills himself, in all these cases, it is not because he assumes the right to do so but, on the contrary, because it is his duty." (p.219)

"We thus confront a type of suicide differing by incisive qualities from the preceding one.  Whereas the latter [egoistic] is due to excessive individuation, the former is caused by too rudimentary individuation." (p.221)

The historical transition identified in the Division of Labor moves from high integration and regulation (altruistic suicide) to low integration and regulation (egoistic suicide) Although social interactions increase over time in the transition toward modernity, the social structure does not "envelop" people any more, they interact with many different persons and groups but are not integrated into any one world. Accordingly, people are not regulated sufficiently, disattachment, emptiness, and highly
separated individuals are the consequence. Hence the linear increase in the suicide rate, which is really an increase in egoistic suicide. Egoistic here does not mean "following one's own interest"--rather, it means an orientation away from others in terms of meaningful social relations to others.

In contrast, altruistic suicide occurs when the self is too full of society. The self loses significance by virtue of the deep embeddedness in the group. Examples for this form of suicide are the Buddhist monks who burned themselves to protest against the Vietnam war; terrorists who blow themselves up together with their target. Cults try to create altruistic societies by stripping away ties their members may have to society at large, to kin and friends. The military, too, aims at eliminating every external expression of individuality with uniforms and such; social relations outside the unit are discouraged, and the self is completely re-oriented toward the unit and away from kin, friends, and civil society.
 

Anomic Suicide (Chapter 5)
Sometimes, the two dimensions of social relations are ripped apart. By taking into account these abnormal situations, Durkheim was able to account for some bizarre empirical findings in regard to the suicide rate. He found that during economic down-swings, counter intuitively, the suicide rate decreases. The imagery of the Great Depression with lots and lots of people who throw themselves out of the windows of their offices is empirically irrelevant. When people lose life chances and possessions, social relations seem to fill up these gaps, and the suicide rate goes down. In contrast, the suicide rate increases during economic booms. When everything seems possible, people drown in a sea of normlessness. Durkheim termed this condition "anomie" (normlessness.)

ED says,
    "So far is the increase in poverty from causing the increase in suicide that even fortunate crises, the effect of which is abruptly to enhance a country's prosperity, affect suicide like economic disasters." (p.243)

    "If therefore industrial or finanacial crises increase suicides, this is not because they cause poverty, since crises of prosperity have the same result; it is because they are crises, that is, disturbances of the collective order.  Every disturbance of equilibrium, even though it achieves greater comfort and a heightening of general vitality, is an impulse to voluntary death." (p.246)

How is this possible?

To get the answer, he develops the concept of anomie.

"It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone.  Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.  But if nothing can restrain this capacity, it can only be a source of torment to itself." (p.247)  We need a regulatory force, which  must come from an authority (p.248).  Importantly,

"when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence; thence come the sudden rises in the curve of suicides we have pointed out." (p.252)

"The state of de-regulation or anomie is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining" (p.253)

Importantly, this state of anomie is not just due to economic shifts, but cultural and structural positions, thus we see a difference in suicide by position in the economic structure.

"Anomie, therefore, is a regular and specific factor in suicide in our modern societies; one of the springs from which the annual contingent feeds. So we have here a new type to distinguish from the others. It differs from them in its dependence, not on the way in which individuals are attached to society, but on how it regulates them.  Egoistic suicide results from man's no longer finding a basis for existence in life; altruistic suicide, because this basis for existence appears to man situated beyond life itself.  The third sort of suicide, the existence of which has just been shown, results from man's activity's lacking regulation and his consequent sufferings.  By virtue of its origin we shall assign this last variety the name of anomic suicide"

Note that he relates this closely to egoistic.  We will show that it's really a combination that sits on the off diagonal of the intersection of integration and regulation.

Anomie is closely related to the psychological concept of dissonance: where persons are closely tied to two different groups which do not overlap, tensions between two normative worlds are likely to occur. Teenagers, for example, struggle to reconcile the different normative demands of their peer group and their family of origin and thus may occupy an anomic social position. Another classical example are the newly rich. Lottery winners are notoriously unhappy and caught in the tensions between their old world and the new social relations brought about by the sudden fortune.

The structural representation shows the tight integration into two different groups with conflicting normative demands. As people get to have relations to more than one or two groups, normative demands of any one group diminish and the self can develop in a coherent manner.
 

There is a fourth type, that Durkheim only briefly mentions in a footnote, that is logically implied by this intersection:

"The above considerations show that there is a type of suicide the opposite of anomic suicide....  It is the suicide deriving from excessive regulation, that of persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by excessive discipline.  It is the suicide of very young husbands, of the married woman who is childless, .. of slaves ...  To bring out the ineluctable and inflexible nature of a rule against which there is no appeal, and in contrast with the expression "anomie" which has been used, we might call it fatalistic suicide."

The reverse situation, namely excessive regulation without integration, leads to fatalistic suicide The slave is integrated only via the tie to his or her master, the future is fundamentally blocked by excessive regulation. Durkheim's example were childless married women in his world who lack an independent integration into the world via their role as mothers, while the tie to the husband gets increasingly fictive. The husband is free to develop social relations in the social world and thus will be increasingly removed from his wife while she continues to be governed by the norms for conduct and behavior as a married woman.