A test of Durkheim's theory of suicide - Without committing the ''ecological fallacy''

The data adduced by Durkheim in support of the association between religion and suicide have seldom been subjected to scrutiny; when they have been so examined, the scrutiny has been based, of necessity, on data subject to the ''ecological fallacy''. Data for the Netherlands, roughly contemporaneous with Durkheim's, that have recently come to light allow us To test the statistical support for Durkheim's theory about religion and suicide without risk of committing this ''fallacy''. We find the Catholic-Protestant differential in suicide rates to be explicable entirely in terms of the practice of categorizing as ''sudden deaths'' or ''deaths from ill-defined or unspecified cause'' a large proportion of deaths among Catholics which would have been categorized as suicides had they occurred among Protestants. This finding raises doubts not only about Durkheim's theory bur also about other causal theories concerning suicide that rely on a sociological rather than a psychological (or even idiosyncratic) explanation.