FAREWELL TO THE WORLD: A HISTORY OF SUICIDE
By Marzio Barbagli​. Translated by Lucinda Byatt. Polity Press. $41.95.

Sociology students have long been taught Emile Durkheim's​ 1897 egoistic-altruistic-anomic model of suicide. Here to shake it up is this witty Italian scholar and sociologist.

Barbagli​ doubles as primary-source historian and tireless number cruncher.

Durkheim, he contends, underestimated the duration of Europe's lengthy suicide upsurge and misinterpreted its causes. Durkheim's model doesn't help much, in explaining the contrasting East-West suicide trends of recent years.

St Augustine dominates this story, making the decisive break from the suicide mores of ancient Rome or early Christianity.

After the sack of Rome in 410AD he recasts suicide as a "detestable crime".  With differing elaborations across Europe, his interpretation will hold sway "over a millennium".

The author parades the peculiar judicial and physical indignities visited upon medieval European suicides.

The state might snatch their possessions. They risked "catastrophic" social consequences for their loved ones.

After a brief acknowledgement that most suicides have mental illness, the main takeaway here is the big impacts of class and culture (not just religion) on suicide trends.

Barbagli quotes the 16th and 17th-century philosophers, poets and playwrights who challenged the Augustinian suicide settlement.

He finds suicide references in 32 Shakespeare plays. Polymath Sir Thomas Browne coins the very word "suicide" in 1642.

It became "increasingly rare" to drag successful suicides through the streets, but Europe would take centuries to decriminalise the offence. Germany and France moved early, England and Ireland much later.

With typical elan, the author nominates a generous 1990s Vatican catechism as a formal end point to the long Augustinian condemnation.

Why did homicide once outstrip suicide in Europe? Similar moral systems used to discourage the latter more than the former.

"Homicide outside the family area," notes the author, "was tolerated, justified or approved in some situations".

States led the way to more effective condemnation of murder. They had to disarm militias and arm police to assert a "monopoly of legitimate violence". Try telling that to the National Rifle Association.

One graph shows Zurich suicides outstripping murders as early as the 1650s. That wouldn't happen in Italy till the 1800s.

Barbagli's point is that the trends towards increasing suicide and decreasing murder began with the upper echelons of central and northern Europe.

Nowadays, Europe's risks of suicide and murder have mostly trickled down to "more disadvantaged social groups".

Particular social upheavals, it is allowed, may affect suicide trends. Barbagli instances increases in Jewish suicide before and during the Third Reich, German army suicides as Hitler tottered, and Russian suicides after the Soviet Union breakup.

Then again, English and Swiss suicides were discouraged when innocuous methane replaced coal gas in homes. There's another Barbagli takeaway – look for unintended or indirect influences on suicide.

Why has European suicide fallen, just since the 1980s? Cautious about such a recent trend, Barbagli adumbrates the continuing "secularisation and medicalisation of voluntary death". Meaning, maybe people are increasingly rational about seeking professional help for life-threatening mental demons.

Australia, as tabulated here, doesn't reflect the European down trend. But then we're not coming off the high base of central and northern Europe.

Turning to the East, the author illuminates the supposedly "dark indecipherable" custom of sati, the widow's self-immolation on her husband's funeral pyre. Around 1000AD, cunning religious reinterpretation entrenches the sati culture. The British Governor-General of India bans the practice in 1829. As if to avoid a captain's call, first he consults Hindu theological scholars.

Also featured is China's classical "cultural repertoire" of suicide.

One might end one's life for honour, for loyalty to empire or family, against oppression, or craving justice and revenge. The "virtuous" Ming or Qing dynasty woman might suicide after sexual assault, or upon the death of her arranged fiance or husband. Rather confounding Durkheim, suicides fell when late 20th-century urbanisation and industrialisation disrupted China.

As an "authentic" and alarmingly popular cultural innovation, suicide-as-a-weapon scores its own category in Barbagli's revised typology of suicide.

He rejects caricatures of suicide bombers as crazy or ill-educated fundamentalists. Look to their sponsoring organisations, he says, often exercising the tactical "rationality of weak players".

The heavily armed West, conversely, "has had no need to use the body as a bomb".

Perhaps Farewell to the World could have expanded on the contemporary (and psychological) aspects of suicide. But its unsentimental "comparative history" shapes as a lasting contribution to suicide studies.

Stephen Saunders is a Canberra reviewer.