discipline I'm going to be speaking about to you today is sociology.  Sociology is

the field in which you study human behavior and human experience and how it relates to

the fact that individuals are embedded within larger groups and collections of individuals.

 When you see an individual as a member of a group or the collectivity you get a completely

different perspective on that person and on the groups of which they are a member and

in fact, in sociology we explore a fundamental tension and that tension arises because of

two facts.  On the one hand you yourself have your own identity and your own agency

and your own ability to make choices that affect your life, but on the other hand there

is a collective responsibility for your life as well and it turns out that collective supra-individual

factors can have as much to do with all kinds of aspects of your life, including whether

you live or die as your own genes or your own choices and it turns out that supra-individual

collective factors can have as much to do with what happens to you in your life and

even with whether you live or die as things within you, your own genes or your own choices.

Now

supra-individual factors such as where you live, what kind of networks you are a part

of, social interactions you are a part of, what kind of institutions are nearby, for

instance governments or hospitals, all of these are critical in shaping your life and

all of our lives and these supra-individual factors can include things like inequality,

culture and religion as well.

Supra-individual factors like where you live or where you are

located in these vast face-to-face networks that we human beings assemble or what kinds

of formal institutions are near you like governments or hospitals for example can have as much

to do with what happens to you in your life as your own decisions and your own actions.

 Other sorts of things are important too, like inequality or culture or religion and

those sorts of supra-individual factors have a similar importance.

This is the difference

between what we want to understand as structure and agency between social constraints and

opportunities on the one hand and individual choices and actions on the other hand and

a second key idea beyond that first one-
This the difference between structure and agency,

between collective constraints and opportunities that constrain and permit you to do certain

kinds of things in your life on the one hand and your own individual choices and actions

that permit you to do other sorts of things on the other hand.  That is the first big

idea that I’d like to communicate today.  

The second big idea that sociology

explores and that I would like to communicate today is that collective phenomena are not

mere aggregations of individual phenomena.  There is something different, something

special about groups of people, about collectivities that does not reside within the individuals

themselves, something that emerges, something that transcends, something that is above and

not a part of solely individual kinds of things that you might think of.  

A second

key idea in sociology is that collective phenomena are not mere aggregations of individual phenomena.

 There is something special, something weird almost about groups of individuals, about

collectivities, something weird that you cannot see if you just study individuals, but that

you must study whole groups of people in order to really understand.

So how did I become interested in these crazy ideas?  Actually

I started my career as a physician and I went to medical school and at the time I wanted

to be a reconstructive surgeon and I wanted to operate on people who had cranial facial

abnormalities or people whose extremities had been cut off and reattach these extremities

and I used to cut class my first year of medical school and go operate with some of the surgeons

at Children’s Hospital in Boston and I did this for quite awhile and eventually as we

would operate on these kids they were primarily kids, one after another, day after day, I

came to the realization that the kind of healthcare that I wanted to practice was not the kind

that took care of people one at a time, but rather, the kind that tried to take care of

whole populations of people.  I mean I wanted to understand why do groups of people become

sick, not just why do individuals become sick and how can we make groups become well, not

just individuals become well one at a time and part of this was prompted by my realization

that I was running around putting my fingers in the dike.  One hole after another was

springing water and we were running around, all of us, trying to plug these holes and

I was interested in how can we make a better dike, how can make a situation in which fewer

people become sick to begin with, in which we spring fewer holes to begin with, in the

dike as it were and in fact I began to ask what I came eventually to see as sociological

questions about the origins of illness and disease and suffering and death in our society

and I wanted to understand how we could have a sociological response, a collective response

to these sorts of problems and in fact this dovetails to some extent with an interest

in public health, which can be contrasted with a kind of interest in clinical medicine

which takes care of patients one at

a time.  

So let’s start by taking a look at a personal testament, a very seemingly individualistic

statement that a human being is making about their own life, about what would seem to be

a quintessentially private individualistic decision, namely whether to take your own

life and to commit suicide.  This is Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s suicide note.  She was

75 years-old when she took her life and the note says:  “The time is approaching when

we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged

agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.  Believing this choice to

be of social service in promoting wiser views on this question, I have preferred chloroform

to cancer.” 

And the note said:  The time is approaching when we shall consider

it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which

we should mercifully end in any other creature.  Believing this choice to be a social service

in promoting wiser views on this question, I have preferred chloroform to cancer.”

 

So despite the fact that this woman is taking her life and despite the fact that

she is writing a suicide note notice that the note contains or eludes to kind of connections

to others even as she was ending her own life.  She bemoans the fact that society is not

sensitive to her pain and even while dying she is trying to make a contribution to society.

 She is trying to be connected to other individuals.  

Here is another note:  “Dear God,

please have mercy on my soul.  Please forgive me.  I can’t stand the pain anymore.”

 And that note was written by a 76 year-old grandmother who isolated by depression and

disability crawled into her basement freezer to kill herself by the cold and you might

ask what kind of a social system permits this to happen, permits one of its members to be

so alone, to feel so isolated that this is the choice that they would make and in fact

you might ask was this suicide truly an individual act, was it really purely an individual choice. 

Another

one, Ron Berst jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and in his will he donated $10,000

to AIDS research.  This is his note:  “To the San Francisco Police Department or equivalent

jurisdiction.  This is to state that I, Ron R. Burst did take my own life due to the fact

that I have the disease AIDS and it has progressed both rapidly and to the point where number,

I constantly feel ill and have almost no energy and number two, I very soon expect to become

a burden to my friends and family and I do not want to put any of them through such an

ordeal.  I sincerely regret any inconvenience that this may have caused anyone involved.

 I honestly believe that a fast end such as this while one is still able, yet ill enough

to justify it is easier on my close friends who have been so unbelievably supportive emotionally

for me and my family who have been no less so than to drag this out.  I did not give

up.”

So again in Mr. Berst’s note notice the social concern.  His death is

not an individual act at all.  First of all, it was public.  He jumped off the Golden

Gate Bridge.  People saw him.  Second, it was guided by a concern for others.  He is

worried about his friends and family and third, it is infused with the social ties that connect

him to his family and his friends.  

Now there is another way that suicide is social

as well.  It is not just the connection the individual has to others.  It is the responsibility

that others have to the individual.  It is about how social and structural factors constrain

or permit individual acts even like suicide.  For example, this is an image of the Golden

Gate Bridge from which Ron Berst jumped and this bridge is unusual in its design because

the sidewalk as you can see is directly next to the edge of the image.  He walked along

the sidewalk and then just jumped over that railing, stood there and jumped right over.

And

this is a picture of Kevin Hines who almost met the same fate as Mr. Berst.  In September

of 2000 at the age of 19 suffering from depression he went to the Golden Gate Bridge and he stood

there for 40 minutes crying.  No one approached him to ask what was wrong and then eventually

a tourist came up and asked him if he could take her photograph.  Hines interpreted this

as a clear sign that no one cared.  He took the picture and then when she walked away

he turned around and he jumped right over the railing, but instantly he says he realized

that he had made a mistake.  He changed his mind.  “Oh shit,” he thought, “I don’t

want to die.”  “What am I going to do?” he later recalled.  In midair he came up

with a plan to save his life as he described as follows:  “It was simply this.  “A;

God save me, B; throw your head back and C; hit feet first.”  And it takes four seconds

to drop the 220 feet from the height of the Golden Gate Bridge to the water and you eventually

reach a speed of 75 miles per hour and among the over 1,200 people who have jumped off

the bridge since 1937 only 26 are believed to have survived and interestingly a large

percentage of those who attempt the jump when they are interviewed afterwards say that they

regretted the decision as soon as they jumped.  

For example, another jumper, Kevin

Baldwin was 28 and also severely depressed in August of 1985 when he jumped and he later

said the following thing:  “I still see my hands coming off the railing.  I instantly

realized that everything in my life that I thought was unfixable was totally fixable

except for having just jumped.”

It is 220 feet from the deck of the bridge to

the water and it takes just four seconds to reach the bottom and by which point you are

traveling at 75 miles per hour.

Even allowing for the fact that we cannot know

what all the successful suicides would have said had we been able to interview them these

kinds of reports by people who jumped and survived beg the question of how to prevent

these kinds of supposedly purely individual acts.  What would happen to these people

if somehow society could have prevented them from jumping, if there somehow had been a

structure in place which had constrained the agency of these individuals?  One landmark

study conducted in 1978 of 515 people who were removed from the Golden Gate Bridge before

they had jumped and followed them for an average of about 26 years afterwards found that 94%

were still alive or had died of natural causes many years later, so suicidal behavior is

acute and crisis driven and if the individual is prevented from acting on their suicidal

impulses by those around him it might not be repeated.

There are quite a number of remarkable things about

such stories.  No doubt these individuals and their illnesses are central actors in

the experience of the individual, but I want to highlight two other observations.  One

is the role of the perceived indifference expressed by the person that Kevin encountered.

 This point points to an important theme in sociology, the rule of social connection

in our personal experience and the role of our embededness in the lives of others.  So

one thing I would like to highlight is the perceived indifference on the part of the

person that approached Kevin.  One thing that I would like to highlight is the perceived

indifference on the part of the person, the tourist that approached Kevin because this

highlights an important theme or an important idea in sociology, namely the idea that we

are all connected to each other.  The role of connection in our experience of the world

and the role of our embededness in others is in fact a key consideration or a key point

that sociologists are interested in.  

The other important thing to realize from these

stories is the importance of extra individual factors that help determine individual outcomes

as I alluded to the role of structure versus the role of agency.  Now the Golden Gate

Bridge has a foot path adjacent to the railing unlike most bridges and people still regularly

kill themselves from it and if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge you can see some ideas

about how we might constrain individual agency, how we might as a society respond to prevent

people from jumping.  For example, suicide barriers such as this one at other sites have

drastically reduced and often even eliminated suicides such as at the Eifel Tower, the Empire

State Building or the Sydney Harbor Bridge, but a barrier has not been put at the Golden

Gate Bridge for reasons that many, myself included find a bit silly.  Namely, that

it would somehow ruin the aesthetics of the bridge, but here is an artist rendering of

one possible solutions and it doesn’t look so bad.  This argument it turns out has been

around for years, but finally in February of 2010 the Golden Gate Bridge Board after

many years of lobbying agreed to put some suicide nets under the bridge to catch jumpers,

but they did not agree to assign the use of any toll revenue for this purpose, so still

there is nothing there to prevent suicide.

So this is a particularly specific and dramatic

illustration of the interplay between structure and agency, between policy decisions made

at the collective level and the ability of an individual even to stay alive.  Moreover,

this is a particularly powerful illustration not only of the issue of structure versus

agency, but also of more complicated ideas, namely, the issue of group level phenomena