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Los Angeles Times Valley Edition | Glendale News-Press | 2005 September 24
Irreversible acts, collective responsibility
BY PATRICK AZADIAN
I'd like it very much if I could only write about happy things. As it turns out, life is not always about the happy stuff. And achieving happiness is not as simple as the Armenian motto: "Lav usenk, lav gullah," (Let's say good; so it can be good.)
I was sadly reminded of this truth a few weeks ago. A friend informed me that an acquaintance of hers had committed suicide.
In my lifetime, I have known three people who have tragically ended their own lives in dramatic circumstances. In my mind, it's three too many.
So why write about such a sad and taboo topic? Why not let the victims rest in peace, and why drag back memories that can resurrect deep wounds among family and friends?
The answer is simple. I think it's human nature to avoid such topics, and as a result, it's difficult to learn from these experiences. This applies to the society at large.
And in the Armenian community, things are often hush-hush. If things are hush-hush, there is no information. If there is no information, there is no crisis. And if there is no crisis, there is no intervention.
"Lav usenk, lav gullah," is not just a slogan, but also a way of life for many. Shove problems under that expensive Persian carpet, and somehow they will magically fly away.
It is probably a coincidence that all three of my troubled acquaintances had things in common. Although my sample population is not big enough to draw any concrete conclusions, it's difficult to ignore the parallels in their lives.
All three were men, they were in their early 30s or 40s, they all had either been recently divorced or about to get divorced, their wives had initiated the dissolution of marriage, they were all Armenian and they all came from tightly-knit and traditional families. Moreover, they all decided to end their lives in dramatic manners (two used handguns, and one used a rope), knowing full well that family members would be the first to discover the results.
Popular wisdom would have us believe the act of suicide is first and foremost an act of despair of a person who does not wish to live. There is often a tendency to attribute such acts solely to the individual. An individual whom we may casually call "depressed."
Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology, chose to study causes for suicide, which affected not the isolated individual, but the group. He concluded that suicide "must necessarily depend on social causes and be in itself a collective phenomenon."
His methods were entirely based on the principle that social facts must be studied as external to the individual. Durkheim concluded that suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social group to which the individual belongs. Meaning, the less integrated the individual into society, the higher the possibility of suicide.
Durkheim also discovered that religion protects the individual from killing himself.
However, this is not because religion preaches respect for life, but because religion gives rise to a tight society. "What constitutes this society is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful which are traditional and therefore obligatory," he said. The stronger these bonds, the better the individual is integrated into the community.
The ties binding the Armenian community are not very different from the ones in a religious society. The bonds to the church, culture, the desire for survival against an attempted genocide and above all, the traditional belief in the sanctity of family, are some of the factors, which make the community a particularly tight one.
Moreover, according to Durkheim, just as religious society guards the individual from destroying himself, the domestic society (family) can also act as a protective agent against suicide. Durkheim discovered that marriage had its own preservative effect against suicide.
In the case of my acquaintances, who committed suicide, the integration into their "religious" (ethnic) society and domestic (family) society may have taken a battering once they faced the possibility of life without a spouse.
It is plausible that the strong bonds the victims possessed with their ethnic society were broken once they exited the norm by becoming divorcees in a community that frowns upon the act of separation. Furthermore, dissolution of marriage in itself may have created a state of chaos in the victims' minds. As Durkheim said: "It is not because personal bonds that united them (husband and wife) were broken, but because the family suffers a disaster, the shock of which is borne by the survivor."
If we accept Durkheim's findings that suicide necessarily depends on social causes and is a collective phenomenon, it follows that the community has a collective responsibility for these irreversible acts.
A responsibility, which we often shed by attributing the cause of the tragedy solely to the victim.
May their souls rest in peace.
Copyright 2005 Glendale News Press
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