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This is a sociological study in which the differences in the suicide rates of various neighborhoods and social groups in London are examined
and interpreted in terms of their social and cultural structure. It aims to provide 'an objective body of fact regarding the social conditions that engender suicide or suicidal inclinations in a group', resulting in 'data on which a practical program of mental hygiene may be based'. The study consists of two complementary parts: first, a statistical correlation of suicide rates in the twenty-eight Metropolitan Boroughs and the City, with selected indices of their social characteristics; second, an analysis of social and other facts pertaining to four hundred nine cases of suicide reported to the coroner for North London during a three-year period, serving to validate the statistical correlations and to determine whether they reveal a causal relationship.
The findings showed high social mobility and its concomitant, social isolation, to be the conditions most conducive to suicide. Social isolation here encompasses a variety of situations beside that of the lonely boardinghouse dweller: unemployment, with its implication of social rejection; the solitude of the aged, lacking contemporaries who share the same values; the immigrant's difficulty of adjusting to an unfamiliar culture as well as the nouveau riche's floundering in a new and unaccustomed milieu, etc. As to the complex relation between economic status and suicide, the data strikingly demonstrate that indigenous poverty does not foster suicide; its occurrence in the lower economic groups could largely be correlated with the loss of status. It was found to be more frequent in certain higher economic groups featuring greater social mobility and less social control of the individual. Significant findings, moreover, relate the incidence of suicide to conditions of social disorganization in general, i.e., the same conditions that yield high rates of divorce, illegitim