Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis and suicide in Bangladesh: Some explanations through Durkheim’s Sociology of Suicide

Anisur Rahman Khan, Helal Uddin, Anowarul Kayes Shimul and Masum Billah

Journal of Community Positive Practices, 2022, issue 3, 3-17

Abstract: Whilst the world is experiencing an unprecedented and devastating public health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars have apprehended that economic, social and mental health consequences brought by the pandemic might intensify suicidality amongst people. At this backdrop, this content analysis traces the relationship between suicidality and the COVID-19 pandemic employing Emile Durkheim’s classical theoretical postulation of the sociology of suicide in the context of Bangladesh. The analysis is based on case reports identified through online newspaper search spanning from January 01 to May 15, 2020. During this period, 10 Covid-19 induced suicide cases were identified. The analysis of the findings captures the linkages between COVID-19 crisis and suicidal behavior according to Durkheim’s four-fold typology of the social causation of suicide. The identified cases were fit into egoistic (2), anomic (5) and fatalistic (3) categories. No case was relevant to the altruistic category. As there is no national suicide prevention strategy in Bangladesh, this analysis highlights several immediate and short prevention strategies. Furthermore, this analysis contributes to our sociological understanding that Durkheim’s macro-level theory has the potentials to analyze micro-level/case-based suicide incidents.

Keywords: Durkheim; suicide; sociology of suicide; COVID-19; social impact; Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://jppc.ro/index.php/jppc/article/view/561/398 First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cta:jcppxx:3221

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Community Positive Practices from Catalactica NGO
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ene Mihai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).