What is social death?

Social death is on many occasions used too broadly by academics in several different disciplines, creating ambiguity around its application. Conceptual clarification is needed, not least because of the importance of the empirical topics to which the concept has been applied, such as genocide, slavery and dementia. Analysis of repeatedly occurring structural similarities in diverse studies of social death reveals three underlying notions: a loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness and losses associated with disintegration of the body. The article concludes firstly, that social death is a multifaceted phenomenon with a single conceptual framework; secondly, that in order to preserve the concept’s theoretical potential it should only be used for the most extreme circumstances whereby most or all of the key facets are severely compromised and/or lost; thirdly, that social death might be usefully seen as the opposite of well-being, so that well-being and social death each clarify the meaning of the other