The Politics Of Suicide By Maria Teresa Brancaccio Essay

In The Politics of Suicide, Maria Teresa Brancaccio, Eric J. Engstrom, and David Lederer investigate and unravel the conceptualization and operationalization of suicide in the years leading up the Emile Durkheim. It wasn’t until the age of the Enlightenment that the concept of taking one’s own life was deemed worthy of scientific analysis (Brancaccio, Engstrom, Lederer, 2013). It was during this time that police, physicians, and mental health care providers began to determine the indicators of such potential behaviors and began to see such rising trends as modern social dilemma (2013). In 1820, due to the work of Andre-Michel Guerry and Adolphe Quetelet, the basic foundations for moral based statistics pertaining to immoral behaviors developed; of specific interest here was suicide. From this foundation came several contrasting views on the origin of what produced suicidal like behaviors. Some reserved a Humanistic approach while others took on a more fatalistic approa ch as they believed such actions would undermine the Christian belief. Nationalists set their minds on the idea that foreign influences were the cause of such acts while other theorists sided with Darwinism and simply viewed these irreversible acts as simply, â€Å"survival of the fittest (2013).† Although the growing prevalence of suicide had sparked the attention of some physicians, psychiatrists, and sociologists previously, the concept of suidiciology is still relatively new. It wasn’t really until the