ABSTRACT
Research into suicide as a social and psychological phenomenon dates back to the late eighteenth century. Few other types of human act can have attracted the same measure of continuous interest on the part of students in several disciplines: sociology, psychology, psychiatry and medicine. According to Douglas, certain 'metaphysical ideas' dominate the nineteenth-century literature on suicide. In most sociological studies of suicide authors have based their ideas, like Durkheim did, on surveys of completed suicide, the implication being that 'failed' suicide attempts are the same in all significant. The most important of such metaphysical ideas are the following: 'social actions are in some way caused by meanings held by the individual and shared by other members of the society', 'meanings of other individual's actions', 'meaningful social actions are just as subject to counting and quantitative analyses as are physical objects and properties'.
