Worrisome suicide surge in Korea
March 11, 2014 Leave a comment
2014-03-07 17:30
Worrisome suicide surge
Unfortunately, Korea is second to none when it comes to suicides. It appears that not a single day passes without news reports on unusual suicide deaths, and this is all the more so recently.
Soon after news of a mother and two daughters in their 30s having taken their own lives after enduring indescribable hardship made headlines, a female contestant on a TV reality matchmaking show shocked the nation by killing herself during a week-long production shoot at a guesthouse on Jeju Island.
On Thursday, a key witness in the alleged evidence forgery case involving a North Korean defector of Chinese descent attempted suicide by cutting his neck with a knife.
Now Koreans are far more familiar with suicides than before, and this reality is bolstered by numbers.
According to statistics for causes of death by Statistics Korea, the toll of suicide deaths has more than tripled in the past two decades ― from 8.3 per 100,000 people in 1992 to 28.1 in 2012.
As far as suicides are concerned, the currency crisis in 1998 seemed momentous ― since then the suicide rate surged to 24.8 in 2007 and reached a peak at 31.7 in 2011 before slowing to 28.1 in 2012.
In 2012, 29.1 Koreans out of 100,000 committed suicide, the most among the 34-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and 2.3 times the average suicide rate of the economic club of rich countries.
Most outrageous is the globally unrivaled suicide rate among elderly citizens. In 2011, the suicide rate for people over 65 reached 80.3 out of 100,000, compared with 27.9 in Japan, 16.8 in Sweden and 28.0 in France.
Poverty, diseases and family disorganization are behind our glaringly high suicide rate among the aged. It’s ironic to see those who had toiled day and night to achieve the nation’s rags-to-riches phenomenon commit suicide to lessen the burden on their children.
There are various reasons for the high suicide rate, but the focus should be on economic difficulties, which had become more prevalent since the currency turmoil. This explains why the government should not be misled to believe that suicide is an individual problem.
What’s urgently needed therefore is to mend the social safety net whose fundamental flaws have been revealed explicitly through the latest mother-daughters suicide.
Among other things, the current system of obliging incapable sons and daughters to support their parents needs improvements in one form or another.
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