The book is a categorical description of suicidal mentality from a sociological point of view. The reader should use discretion reading this content.
Durkheim begins by explaining that suicide is when a person knowingly incurs their own death, either actively or passively. He splits them into four categories, the egoistic suicide, the altruistic suicide, the anomic suicide, and the fatalistic suicide. He spends the book elaborating on these four.
He says egoistic suicide is what happens when a person is driven to suicide by failing to integrate with their broader community. In other words, when a person feels ostracized, they can begin to feel extremely rejected and depressed, which often accelerates their poor performance in society, making the mental health issues worse. He notes that this happens most frequently to single folks who can't quite find their mate, because they don't fit in with their broader community in a successful way.
Of altruistic suicide, Durkheim says that some people can be driven to suicide by group think, as in cases of military service, where someone will accept their death as the necessary cost of some belief system, or as in cases of cult mass suicides.
Anomic suicide is what happens when a person rejects the social norms of those around them. Typically, this comes with feelings of moral shame and urgency, and the failure to deal with these feelings of directionless-ness can often bring about panic and ultimately a despair so intense it consumes one's mind and brings them toward suicide.
In the final suicide, the fatalistic suicide, the person is hyper-orderly. They are so choked up by their own excessive self-control that they don't realize they are enforcing their orderliness upon themselves by threat of hatred. Another kind of fatalistic suicide might be in the case of physical capture, like a prisoner for instance. Perhaps the regulation of their reality (the imposition of control upon them) makes them suffer so extremely, that they would rather die than be locked up in someone's control.
He ends his discussion by reminding his colleagues that by analyzing sociological features of these behaviors, they can perhaps be predicted and avoided. He notes that perhaps systemic changes could be made to help the growing epidemic of unnecessary hopelessness.
