Last year 25.2 out of every 100,000 Koreans took their own lives, meaning it has the highest suicide rate among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states. 4.7 percent of all deaths are suicides, making it the fourth most frequent killer of Koreans, after cancer, stroke, and heart disease. Suicide killed more than "accidents." You wonder how many people attempted to take their lives yet survived anyway. It's sad and it's shameful.
The rapid increase in suicides is a relatively new phenomenon. Last year they were 2.5 times more frequent than ten years prior. Taking that into consideration, the assumption is that suicide has become more frequent as people lose hope because of insecurity about their jobs and personal bankruptcy since the financial crisis. People in their thirties, forties, and fifties accounted for 62.7 percent of all whom took their lives, and men in those age groups who bear the burden of being head of their households committed suicide two to three times more often than women.
Suicide is surely not the right choice, but you can't do nothing but criticize people for that choice, either. The statistics do not show you everything about the pain hidden inside a person. We need to begin by preventing suicide to the greatest extent possible. It is time for the government to get actively involved in preventing suicide by among other things expanding medical programs that include the development of specialists who can assist those at risk.
The more fundamental response should be restoring warmth in our society, which is getting colder and colder as time goes on. Competition is what powers growth in a capitalist economy, but the problem is that a shallow justification of winning has completely taken over Korean society. Our society is ridiculously lacking in the structural apparatus necessary for becoming a lamp of hope for those in despair.
The Hankyoreh, 29 September 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] Korea, First in Suicides |
