How can Durkheim’s study of suicide help us understand why suicidal ideation and attempts have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic for various populations?

Question 1 As stay-at-home orders and social distancing dragged from weeks to months, the social consequences of COVID-19 began to have severe impacts beyond the actual illness from the virus.
Stay-at-home restrictions have cut off many people from their daily routines, sources of income, and social networks, contributing to a wide variety of psychological, social, and physical responses including anxiety, depression, loneliness and isolation, substance abuse, chronic stress, uncertainty about the future, as well as fears of contracting the disease. Suicide rates had been on the rise in the United States prior to the pandemic, but the conditions of 2020 seemed to have further increased suicidal ideation across several countries
Reports of mental health issues, self-harm, and suicidal ideation have increased among the population in general. However, they are disproportionately affecting young adults, women, the Black and Latinx populations, essential workers, unpaid caregivers, and those with preexisting conditions. The stresses of economic and employment insecurity, strained or overburdened family relationships, lack of access to adequate medical care, workplace distress, exposure to risks of contracting COVID-19, and ongoing struggles with mental health have exacerbated many of the social inequalities already present in the United States. Furthermore, closures of schools and the move to virtual and remote learning have negatively impacted the physical and mental health of many students.
Questions:
a) How can Durkheim’s study of suicide help us understand why suicidal ideation and attempts have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic for various populations?
b) Please refer also to Durkheim’s concept of anomie in this context.
c) Why might some people (members of minority populations, students, etc.) suffer more than others?

Question 4) Approximately twenty-four Osage Indians died violent or suspicious deaths during the early 1920s. These were rarely investigated by local authorities; some were never solved. (The deaths of some alleged victims who lacked discernable wounds were simply ascribed to “indigestion,” “peculiar wasting illness[es],” or “causes unknown.”) The killings subsided after the arrest of William K. Hale in 1926. He was an affluent rancher with banking and business interests, he held political power and was active in Osage affairs. He was also the mastermind of a plot to acquire Osage wealth through murder.
In 1923, the height of the Osage oil boom, the Osage tribe earned more than $30 million in revenue. Under the Osage Allotment Act of 1906 all subsurface minerals within the Osage Nation Reservation (present Osage County, Oklahoma) were tribally owned and held in trust by the U.S. government. Osage mineral leases earned royalties that were paid to the tribe as a whole, with each allottee receiving one equal share, or headright, of the payments. A headright was hereditary and passed to a deceased allottee’s immediate legal heir(s). One did not have to be an Osage to inherit an Osage headright
Hale encouraged his nephew to marry a Osage woman in the area. Mollie Kyle, an allotted full-blood Osage. The nephew, whose name was, Ernest Burkhart, poisoned his wife’s mother , who owned an inherited many of these oil fields. One of Burkhardt’s wife sister was shot to death and another cousin met a similar fate. Another sister and her husband died when their ihome was destroyed by an explosion. With the last one’s death , Burkhardt and his Osage wife inherited a fortune from her mother’s and sisters’ estates.
Hale, Burkhardt and their accomplices were tried after an investigation by the agency that preceded the FBI.
In June 1926 Ernest Burkhart pleaded guilty and received a life sentence. Hale and another accomplice were also sentenced to life in prison.
Despite Osage protests, Hale, Burkhart, and the accomplice were eventually paroled. More surprising, Burkhart received a full pardon from Oklahoma governor Henry Bellmon in 1965. To prevent another “Reign of Terror,” as this dark period in Osage tribal history is often referred, after 1925 federal law prohibited non-Osages from inheriting the headrights of tribal members possessing more than one-half Osage blood.
a) How do you describe the murderous actions orchestrated by Hale and Burkhardt? Are they motivated by racism? Is it genocide? Or is it something that can be better explained in terms of conflict theory and economic /class motives?
b) How do you see the justice system and the laws (old and new) treating the Osage Indians in this case?

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