On Suicide | 
Some light pre-bed reading
pickCertainly a difficult text with lots of sociological theory and data, but the central thesis - the suicide is a phenomena based on social integration - is certainly valid and his typology of suicide is interesting. Definitely a text that one needs to read critically, though, because there is certainly a good deal of 19th century misogyny, racism, and Eurocentrism here.
"Even if one were to establish that the average person never kills himself and that the only people who do so are those who exhibit some abnormality, one would still not be justified in considering madness as a necessary condition for suicide, because a mad person is not simply a man who thinks or acts a little differently from the average."
