When Things Fall Apart — Suicide and the Life-Course

Abstract

In this final empirical chapter we offer a more objectivist reading than has been provided so far. Detailed quantitative analysis of the 100 cases included in our sociological autopsy is presented alongside a more general assessment of the demography of suicide in England and Wales. What we say here should be read in light of what we have already said in earlier chapters, not least because this should guard against the dangers of reifying the relationships that are described below. The meaning of quantitative analysis cannot simply be read off the relationships that are identified but requires a ‘plausible narrative’ that links variables together as sequences of comprehensible human action (Reiner, 2007). In seeking to provide such a narrative, we have drawn on the results of our qualitative work, including that presented below, as well as recent developments in life-course criminology and longer standing psychoanalytic perspectives. We begin by describing two murder-suicide cases, which illustrate the way in which we have sought to move from statistical relationships to sequences of comprehensible human action. Neither formed part of our dataset and each was identified after we had developed our analysis, providing some kind of external validity. Both cases attracted considerable media attention, presumably because the murders meant they stood out from the much larger number of suicides that occur each year.