Suicide: A Study in Sociology

Suicide: A Study in Sociology (French: Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie) is an 1897 book written by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. It was the first methodological study of a social fact in the context of society. It is ostensibly a case study of suicide, a publication unique for its time that provided an example of what the sociological monograph should look like. According to Durkheim,

the term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result. He also believes that because of high levels of anomie there are high levels of suicide.