Prof. Yang Lee
Gyeongsang National University, Republic of Korea
Title: Suicide Incidents Viewed through Philosophy, Sociology, and Psychology: An Analysis Using the B–E–C Model
Abstract:
Why do people commit suicide? Are poor health and economic hardship the primary causes? These factors may contribute, but they are no more decisive than individuals’ everyday values and moral systems. Durkheim and subsequent scholars have argued that suicidal incident tends to increase under conditions of anomie, in which traditional ethics and ideologies become confused or destabilized by emerging ones (Graeff & Mehlkop, 2007). From this perspective, suicidal behavior rests on underlying philosophical foundations related to meaning, norms, and values.
Suicidal incident is one of social influences. Suicidal incidents may spread within related communities over immediate or delayed periods. Although such phenomena do not involve direct causality, they can be explained by social imitation and the modeling of behaviors observed in suicidal situations (Thorlindsson & Bernburg, 2009).
From psychological processes, a suicidal incident involves mental and emotional factors, including disorders such as melancholia. Across both normal and pathological cases, suicidal behavior can be understood as behavior that is emotionally activated and cognitively perceived. In other words, behavior is ignited by emotion, which itself is adjusted by cognition (Blair et al., 2025).
Accordingly, this study presents B–E–C (Behavior–Emotion–Cognition) profiles for various types of suicide, classified by public versus private purposes and by rapid versus delayed temporal patterns.
Keywords: suicide incident; conditions of anomie; social imitation; Behavior–Emotion–Cognition
Graeff, P., & Mehlkop, G. (2007). When anomie becomes a reason for suicide: A new macro-sociological approach in the Durkheimian tradition. European Sociological Review, 23(4), 521-535.
Thorlindsson, T., & Bernburg, J. G. (2009). Community structural instability, anomie, imitation and adolescent suicidal behavior. Journal of adolescence, 32(2), 233-245.
Blair, A. P., Jeong, J., Lee, S., Ju, M., & Lee, Y. (2025) Profiles of suicidal individuals: behavioral, emotional, and cognitive characteristics. Health Psychology Report.
Biography:
His scholarly post is a distinguished professor at Gyeongsang National University, Republic of Korea, and a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratory, Yale University, US. His Ph. D was earned from Seoul National University, Republic of Korea, by a thesis concerned to ‘phonology and morphology’, the problems of which have been analyzed further by his recent papers (Lee & Callero, 2016) and granted successively by N. I. H. His research propensity is represented by his paradigm as ‘Gih’ (Lee, Shaw, & Jin, 2017), which is posited as one of ‘the third entities’ to integrate ‘mind and body’, and ‘subject and object’. The Gih paradigm is refined on ‘scientific philosophy’ and applied to review the problems of ‘language’, ‘social relation’, and ‘perception and action’, which let him known as a cognitive psychologist and a scientific philosopher. Adding personally, what he is absorbed in is practice of some martial arts.