Stress, a recession, strict parents imposing a Confucius-laden ethic to work hard and succeed plus a country that has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams in becoming a financial success on a global scale appear to be a deadly combination. The April 18th Washington Post: “Before South Korea got rich, wired and worried, its suicide rate was among the lowest in the industrialized world. But modernity has spawned inordinate levels of stress. People here work more, sleep less and spend more money per capita on cram schools than residents of the 29 other industrialized countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development… The suicide rate in this prosperous nation of about 50 million people has doubled in the past decade and is now the highest in the industrialized world.” Losing face has its price; failure or a fall from grace carries a steep penalty of social stigma.
Mired in a corruption scandal, former president Roh Moo-hyun jumped committed suicide by jumping off a cliff, leaving a note that read: “I can't begin to fathom the countless agonies down the road.” As Korea’s depressed “nation’s actress,” Choi Jin-sil, “hanged herself in her bathroom in October 2008, a wave of sympathetic suicides swept South Korea and 1,700 people took their lives the following month.” The Post. Her 39-year-old brother, unable to find enough work as an actor, followed suit last month, hanging himself with an electric chord.
Korean families don’t talk about the deceased, making the kind of detailed analysis that psychologists would like to make near impossible. Indeed, seeing a mental health professional is virtually forbidden in Korea (and many other Asian nations) under a Confucianitic ban against talking about personal feelings; going to a shrink is viewed as an admission of severe mental illness, itself a stigma which represents an extreme loss of face. Thus, despite the entry into the modern business world, people in Korea are denied some of the most basic coping mechanisms available in the West.
How bad is it? “The rate of suicide in most other wealthy countries peaked in the early 1980s, but the toll in South Korea continues to climb. Twenty-six people per 100,000 committed suicide in 2008 (the most recent year for which data are available). That's 2 1/2 times the rate in the United States and significantly higher than in nearby Japan, where suicide is deeply embedded in the culture.” Indeed, dying for a higher cause – like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots in World War II – is a form of sacrifice that is antithetical to most Westerners. The vision of Muslim suicide bombers seeking a shortcut to the land of 72 virgins is held in particular disgust by Europeans an d Americans, just as it is revered by many fundamentalists in the Middle East.
In South Korea, suicide has become a plague: “Incidents of suicide are increasing most rapidly among the rural elderly, government figures show, driven among other things by isolation, illness and poverty. Suicide among the young has been abetted by the long hours South Koreans spend online. Police investigators say the Internet enables young people to meet and plan group suicides, even when they are strangers to one another and live in different cities… Suicide is the leading cause of death among South Koreans in their 20s and 30s, and it is the fourth leading cause of death overall, after cancer, stroke and heart disease.” The Post. Pain is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is personal. In these difficult times, maybe it might be good to hug someone today.
I’m Peter Dekom, and people in pain need love too.
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