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 result, its 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

* PATRICK AZADIAN works and lives in Glendale. He may be reached at