Abstract
As one component of a broader social and normative response to the problem of suicide, scientism served to minimize sociopolitical and religious conflict around the issue. As such, it embodied, and continues to embody, a number of interests and values, as well as serving important social functions. It is thus comparable with other normative frameworks and can be appraised, from an ethical perspective, in light of these values, interests, and functions. This work examines the key values, interests, and functions of scientism in suicidology and argues that although scientism has had some social benefit, it primarily serves to maintain political and professional interests and has damaging implications for suicide research and prevention.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
American Association of Suicidology. 2014. Special considerations for telling your own story: Best practices for presentations by suicide loss and suicide attempt survivors. http://www.suicidology.org/Portals/14/docs/Survivors/Loss%20Survivors/Best_Practices_Presentations_Suicide_Loss_Suicide_Attempt_Survivors.pdf. Accessed October 7, 2015.
Aquinas, T. 1990. The Catholic view. In Suicide right or wrong, edited by J. Donnelly, 33–36. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.
Aristotle. 2000. Nicomachean ethics. Translated by R. Crisp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Atkinson, J.M. 1975. Cultural aspects of suicide in Britain. In Suicide in different cultures, edited by N.L. Farberow, 135–158. Baltimore: University Park Press.
Battin, M.P. 1995. Ethical issues in suicide. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Bracken, P., and P. Thomas. 2005. Postpsychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brierre De Boismont, A. 1865. Du suicide et de la folie suicide. Paris: Librairie Germer Baillière.
Caine, E.D. 2013. Forging an agenda for suicide prevention in the United States. American Journal of Public Health 103(5): 822–829.
Cardinal, C. 2008. Three decades of suicide and life-threatening behavior: A bibliometric study. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 38(3): 260–273.
Colt, G.H. 2006. November of the soul: The enigma of suicide. New York: Scribner.
Costa, L.J., J. Voronka, D. Landry, et al. 2012. Recovering our stories: A small act of resistance. Studies in Social Justice 6(1): 85–101.
Cutcliffe, J.R., and P.B. Ball. 2009. Suicide survivors and the suicidology academe: Reconciliation and reciprocity. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 30(4): 208–214.
Cutcliffe, J.R., and P.B. Barker. 2002. Considering the care of the suicidal client and the case for “engagement and inspiring hope” or “observations.” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 9(5): 611–621.
Cutcliffe, J.R., and C. Stevenson. 2007. Care of the suicidal person. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone Elsevier.
Cutcliffe, J.R., C. Stevenson, S. Jackson, and P. Smith. 2006. A modified grounded theory study of how psychiatric nurses work with suicidal people. International Journal of Nursing Studies 43(7): 791–802.
Davidson, L. 2012. Living recovery. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 21(4): 365–366.
de Montaigne, M. 1958. A custom of the island of Cea. In The complete essays of Montaigne, translated by D.M. Frame, 251–261. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
de Wilde, E.J. 2002. Quantitative research in suicidology: Still a well disguised blessing? Archives of Suicide Research 6(1): 55–59.
Digby, A. 1985. Madness, morality and medicine: A study of the York Retreat, 1796–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Donne, J. 1977. Biothanatos. New York: Arno Press.
Donnelly, J. 1990. Suicide: Right or wrong. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.
Douglas, J.D. 1967. The social meanings of suicide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Durkheim, E. 1951. Suicide: A study in sociology. Translated by J.A. Spaulding and G. Simpson. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press
Fearnley, A.M. 2009. Race and the intellectualizing of suicide in the American human sciences, circa 1950–1975. In Histories of suicide: International perspectives on self-destruction in the modern world, edited by J. Weaver and D. Wright, 230–256. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Fitzpatrick, S.J. 2014. Re-Moralizing the suicide debate. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 11(2): 223–232.
Fitzpatrick, S.J., C. Hooker, and I. Kerridge. 2014. Suicidology as a social practice. Social Epistemology. ePub ahead of print, March 12. doi:10.1080/02691728.2014.895448.
Foucault, M. 1965. Madness and civilization. New York: Pantheon.
Gaita, R. 2011. After Romulus. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Giddens, A. 1965. The suicide problem in French sociology. The British Journal of Sociology 16(1): 3–18.
Goldblatt, M.J., M. Schechter, J.T. Maltsberger, and E. Ronningstam. 2012. Comparison of journals of suicidology: A bibliometric study from 2006–2010. Crisis: Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide 33(5): 301–305.
Hamilton, A.M. 1875. Suicide in large cities. Popular Science Monthly 8: 88–95.
Higonnet, M. 1985. Suicide: Representations of the feminine in the nineteenth century. Poetics Today 6(1/2): 103–118.
Higonnet, M. 2000. Frames of female suicide. Studies in the Novel 32(2): 229–242.
Hill, T. 2004. Ambitiosa Mors: Suicide and self in Roman thought and literature. New York and London: Routledge.
Hjelmeland, H., and B.L. Knizek. 2010. Why we need qualitative research in suicidology. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 40(1): 74–80.
Hjelmeland, H., and B.L. Knizek. 2011. Methodology in suicidological research: Contribution to the debate. Suicidology Online 2: 8–10.
Houston, R. 2009. The medicalization of suicide: Medicine and the law in Scotland and England, circa 1750–1850. In Histories of suicide, edited by J. Weaver and D. Wright, 91–118. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kahne, M.J. 1966. Suicide research: A critical review of strategies and potentialities in mental hospitals. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 12(2): 120–129.
Klein, H.K., and K. Lyytinen. 1985. The poverty of scientism in information systems. In Research methods in information systems, edited by E. Mumford and R. Hirscheim, 123–151. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Kushner, H.I. 1989. Self-destruction in the Promised Land. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.
Laird, H.A. 2011. Between the (disciplinary) acts: Modernist suicidology. Modernism/Modernity 18(3): 525–550.
Lester, D. 2000. The end of suicidology. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 21(4): 158–159.
Loughlin, M., G. Lewith, and T. Falkenberg. 2013. Science, practice and mythology: A definition and examination of the implications of scientism in medicine. Health Care Analysis 21(2): 130–145.
MacDonald, M. 1989. The medicalization of suicide in England: Laymen, physicians, and cultural change, 1500–1870. The Milbank Quarterly 67(1): 69–91.
Macquarrie, J. 1986. Existentialism. London: Penguin.
Maris, R.W., A.L. Berman, and M.M. Silverman. 2000. Comprehensive textbook of suicidology. New York: The Guilford Press.
Marsh, I. 2010. Suicide: Foucault, history and truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marušič, A. 2008. Seven steps to integrating suicidology. Crisis: The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention 29(3): 115–117.
Mellor, P.A., and C. Shilling. 1993. Modernity, self-identity and the sequestration of death. Sociology 27(3): 411–431.
Mills, C. 2014. Decolonizing global mental health. New York: Routledge.
Minois, G. 2001. History of suicide. Translated by L.G. Cochrane. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Mishara, B.L., and D.N. Weisstub. 2005. Ethical and legal issues in suicide research. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 28(1): 23–41.
National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention: Suicide Attempt Survivors Task Force. 2014. The way forward: Pathways to hope, recovery, and wellness with insights from lived experience. http://actionallianceforsuicideprevention.org/task-force/suicide-attempt-survivors. Accessed October 7, 2015.
Nelson, S., and S. Armson. 2004. Samaritans working with everyone, everywhere. In New approaches to preventing suicide: A manual for practitioners, edited by D. Duffy and T. Ryan, 291–304. London: Jessica Kingsley.
Paperno, I. 1997. Suicide as a cultural institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Petersen, A., and D. Lupton. 1996. The new public health: Health and self in the age of risk. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Pilgrim, D., and A. Rogers. 2005. The troubled relationship between psychiatry and sociology. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 51(3): 228–241.
Pompili, M. 2010. Suicidology: A new discipline for preventing suicide. In Suicide in the words of suicidologists, edited by M. Pompili, 1–8. New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Rogers, J.R. 2001. Theoretical grounding: The “missing link” in suicide research. Journal of Counseling & Development 79(1): 16–25.
Sadler, J.Z., F. Jotterand, S. Craddock Lee, and S. Inrig. 2009. Can medicalization be good? Situating medicalization within bioethics. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 30(6): 411–425.
Scull, A.T. 1989. Social order/mental disorder: Anglo-American psychiatry in historical perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stenmark, M. 1997. What is scientism? Religious Studies 33(1): 15–32.
Taylor, C. 1995. Two theories of modernity. The Hasting Center Report 25(2): 24–33.
Taylor, C. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tierney, T.F. 2010. The governmentality of suicide: Peuchet, Marx, Durkheim, and Foucault. Journal of Classical Sociology 10(4): 357–389.
Weaver, J.C. 2009. A sadly troubled history. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Webb, D. 2006. Thinking about suicide: Contemplating and comprehending suicide. Melbourne: Victoria University.
White, J. 2012. Youth suicide as a “wild” problem: Implications for prevention practice. Suicidology Online 3: 42–50.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fitzpatrick, S.J. Scientism as a Social Response to the Problem of Suicide. Bioethical Inquiry 12, 613–622 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-015-9662-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-015-9662-4