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Notebook Week 7-5J

How suicide first became a research question

This research has helped me learn many things about my issue. Before doing 

my research I never came to think about why suicide came to be or how it did. 

While doing this research I had learned that In 1897, the French sociologist Émile 

Durkheim (1858-1917) published ​Le suicide: Étude de sociologie [Suicide: A Study in 

Sociology]​. In the article “How Suicide First Became A Research Question”, it was said 

that, “With it, Durkheim largely succeeded in achieving one of his main goals—to 

use an empirical analysis of the subject of suicide to launch the field of modern 

scientific sociology”.  

I have also learned that back in ancient Greece and Rome it was undecided 

at the time whether it was morally acceptable to end one’s life. Although it is their 

own life and body they had eventually decided it shouldn’t be acceptable. At the 

time there were many religions that had believed this was wrong. As stated in the 
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article, “For over a thousand years, Christian thinkers shared the aversion to suicide 

of St. Augustine (354–430), who held the act to be an arrogant refusal to submit to 

God's will; it was widely accepted, He and He alone rightfully decided on when an 

individual’s life should come to an end”.