Cross-cultural study of the thwarting-disorientation theory of suicide.

A cross-cultural survey of 58 cultures was undertaken to investigate the thwarting-disorientation theory of suicide. It was hypothesized that suicide takes place in contexts in which a persons social ties are disrupted or threatened with disruption by the discretionary acts of himself or someone else. Also, it was posited that the more opportunities that a society provides for the occurrence of thwarting disorientation, the greater would be its suicide case rate. Evidence confirming these hypotheses was obtained. In the scientific study of suicide, two approaches have been most evident. The first, deriving its impetus from psychoanalytic theory, focuses the search for the cause of suicide upon the individual and his idiosyncratic history. The second derives from the sociologist Durkheim and his investigation of the influence of societal variables upon suicide rates. The theory of suicide investigated in this paper, the thwarting-disorientation theory, is an attempt to afford recognition to the interaction of both sociological and psychological factors in determining the suicidal act. The thwarting-disorientation (TD) theory of suicide developed from the work of Naroll (1962, 1963). He noted (1963), in a matrix of correlations generated to study a more general frustration-aggression hypothesis, significant correlations between the number of words written about suicide by ethnographers across a sample of 58 societies (see Table 1), and the presence of 7 culture traits: (1) marriage restriction (MR), (2) frequent warfare (FW), (3) drunken brawling (DB), (4) wifcheating (WB), (5) witchcraft accusation (WA), (6) mens divorce freedom (MDF), and (7) defiant homicide (DH). The greater the number of those traits present, the greater the number of words devoted to suicide. Ac-1 This paper is an abridgment of the senior authors doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University. Thanks for help are extended to members