I was reading Suicide by Emile Durkheim (this is a link to a summary); a 450 page behemoth with numbers and inferences about suicides. Durkheim’s work has been seminal to the understanding of suicide from a sociological perspective. Durkheim admits in the introduction to the book that attempting such a task such as recording suicide can be quite a challenge given how many deaths can escape this categorization.
I would think that if Durkheim was born in this age, he would be thoroughly pissed. Perhaps, with the rising world population, with more urbanization kicking in and larger sociological factors which could lead to suicide, documenting these facts would be quite a challenge today. The relative detachment from religious institutions which recorded such a data in the past would also be a contributing factor in making it more difficult to assess the numbers. On the other hand, would the state, which has taken over that responsibility (have they?), be recording such data? Or are we left to the mercy of randomized control trials?
I was just thinking about how with rising populations some things would become tougher to assess, no matter how improved the technology is. Not because the technology is lacking, but because contributing factors to a variety of events are coalescing and perhaps our technologies and data gathering techniques are just not able to match up to the speed with which our society and populations are changing.
