With the first copycat suicide after the late president’s, now seems as good a time as ever to discuss Korea’s suicide problem.
In case you’re too lazy to click that link, the facts are these: a 23 year-old college student hung herself, saying that she was following former President Roh’s example. Roh, of course, jumped off a cliff last week after a corruption probe dragged his name through the dirt, incarcerated his family members, and aggravated his already poor health. We’ll come back to that.

Korea’s suicide problem isn’t merely bad; it’s approaching chronic. Korea’s got the highest rate among the OECD, and the third highest in the developed world (sometimes Finland edges it down to the fourth, depending on the year), behind Russia and Japan. Suicide is the fourth-highest cause of death in this country. I have friends here who once found a dead body while hiking, and in the past month, at least two students in this province killed themselves over difficulties at school. Last year, after popular actress Choi Jin-Sil killed herself, a rash of celebrity suicides followed; five or six more killed themselves in the following month, one singer by burning himself in his car. This rippled throughout the country, too, and rates rose for the rest of the year; the hotline Lifeline Korea reported a much higher volume of calls.
Then, earlier this year, actress Jang Ja-yeon killed herself after suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her TV producers. She named names in her suicide note, and legal action followed.
And, finally, last week the former president killed himself.

What creates this culture where suicide is acceptable?
It is acceptable. There are online forums where people discuss how and why they want to commit suicide; 59% of Korean teens consider suicide, and 11% have attempted it. The government rewarded Roh’s suicide by calling off the investigation, giving their tacit approval to his death by showing that suicide does get your family or reputation out of trouble. Roh put his own stamp of approval on suicide as a problem-solver, as does every other star or politician who kills himself.

History!
Korea, you know, has a rigid Confucianist background. All society was ordered according to obligations to country and family. It’s much less rigid today, but still evident. At any sort of staff meeting, it’s always the women making coffee for the men; old men are routinely let off the hook for horrible crimes because of this deep-seated respect for elders. So it’s no surprise that matters of familial duty and honor trump personal well-being. It’s the same pressure that leads to Japan’s more popular tradition of seppuku; “You have disgraced your family! There is only one way to restore honor!”
But compounding this is the subtler notion of “kibun”, something like the Korean counterpart of self-esteem. It can also be translated as “face” - dignity and pride (but not vanity), both inward and outward. One must maintain one’s own kibun and avoid damaging that of others - the problem is that it is easy to damage others’ kibun. Interactions of which Westerners would think nothing can be damaging to a Korean’s kibun - things like small impolitenesses (not bowing properly or frequently enough, or to the wrong people), social snubs (”I don’t want to eat lunch with you, I just want to be alone for a little while”), or winning an argument. Blatant offenses are even more damaging. When kibun is damaged, it can take some time to regenerate. So when, say, Jang Ja-Yeon was forced to have sex with her bosses, she may not have been able to conceive that her kibun could recover from such a blow. When Roh was investigated, he lost face (almost completely). In America, we encourage a sense of self-worth derived from our own opinion of ourselves - “Who cares what someone else thinks about you?” In Confucianist Korea, that idea is much, much weaker. Choi Jin-sil killed herself after intense Internet hate sparked by her former lover’s suicide. I’m not saying that Koreans have a poor sense of self-esteem, only that they are more susceptible to letting their self-esteem be influenced by external rather than internal forces.
Furthermore, the Confucist ethic requires harmony in all things. Koreans don’t want to be different. They’re proud of their 99% ethnic Korean population; they drive white and black cars, with a very occasional red one. There are only a few brands of milk, juice, beer. They all drink soju, even though no one can actually like the stuff. They like to do things together. This sounds glib; what I mean, though, is that they respond easily to peer pressure. If someone else does something, it’s okay.

Deeper into history!
It’s no secret that Korea had a twentieth century that experts might liberally describe as “fucked.” They suffered through forty years of the worst brutality inthe Japanese occupation, then a traumatic civil war, then forty years of military dictatorship marked by oppression, sometimes bloody, and a rocketship-ride to industrialization the whole time. Fifty years ago, this country was rice paddies and the occasional railroad. Now it is Seoul, with its 23 million people and fourteen subway lines, and state-of-the-art handphones, flatscreen TVs on every surface, and wealth never dreamt of. Giddy with this modern state, the country has never really worked through the severe trauma of the past century. One can see how this tumultuous past could be disaffecting.
And then there’s the pressure cooker of the Korean education system, which is a topic for another post. Suffice to say it is often literally murderous. Suicide rates peak around the time of high school exams. Exams here determine the course of one’s life; teenagers are not built to handle that kind of pressure. Reform is desperately needed on this front.

And, finally, there’s the poor treatment given to those with mental illnesses, including victims of depression and substance abuse. It’s still considered a subject of shame to suffer from depression here, and the number and training of psychiatrists is below standard for a nation with this human development index. Jang Ja-Yeon expressed frustration with her inadequate psychiatric care. Most don’t receive it. I know that at my school, and most schools, mentally handicapped children are mixed with the general population. There aren’t enough teachers to tend to them, and they don’t receive much additional training. This is indicative of Korea not coming to grasp with the problem of people with different mental abilities.

The Korean government could address the problem by … addressing the problem. They’ve been quiet about it, saying little to nothing to discourage people from killing themselves. This is a burgeoning problem, and it will worsen - the last PRESIDENT just killed himself, for crying out loud! The government needs to tackle this problem immediately; they need to set up hotlines; they need to encourage depressed people to seek counseling, and they need to improve the quality and availability of that counseling. (Unfortunately, the Lee Myung-Bak administration is not known for its compassion or civic sensitivity - they are the embodiment of what one candidate means when he calls another “out of touch”.) Most of all, they need to overhaul the ineffective and deleterious public education system, or they’ll be cutting teenagers down from trees and shower curtain rods for some time to come.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 1:22 am and is filed under Korea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.