Social facts exist because of human sociability. Given their facts, natural scientists and social scientists study how those facts vary with one another. At a glance, suicide may look like an individual, personal, and psychological act of self-destruction, but Durkheim established that suicides are social and interpersonal acts open to sociological analysis. Durkheim indentified four types of suicide. Egotistic suicides resulted from too much individualism.
Egotists kill themselves as a way of gaining the attention of other people.
Alturistic suicides happen when someone kills himself or herself for the good of the remaining members of the group. Fatalistic suicides arise from extreme social regulation, when people kill themselves because they've lost hope. All these suicides are due in part to the victim's faulty social relationships with his or her community. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , Durkheim explains how we perceive society. Religions, according to Durkheim, reflect the social relationships that characterize people's societies.