Korean here. Korea is too competitive, and its system is so corrupt that younger people are feeling hopeless and committing suicide. For them, it's the last resort and the only way out of their misery. It's been many years since Korea has taken its place as no.1 in suicidal rate. It's currently the worst time for the younger generations with very high unemployment rate and very low wages ($5 minimum wage while average housing price in Seoul is hitting its record high around $500k).
Yet, what people with power and money are trying is to blame them for not having a "strong" and "positive" mindset.
I once watched a TV show where they gathered up people with failed suicide attempts. They end up saying "love yourself".
Instead of fixing obvious systematic problems, they always blame the poor people and tell them things like "money doesn't buy you a happiness." and "love is a cure to every problem".
It just makes me so angry.
EDIT: They also say things like "Be more appreciative that you were not born in North Korea!"
The unemployment rate for under 25 in places like Spain and Greece is 50%. Why aren't we seeing more suicide there?
I think there's something specific about suicide in the East that we just don't have in the West for whatever reason. There's a sort of social acceptance of it, but here, there's no tolerance of it. Maybe there's more resources for depressed people in the West as mental illness is beginning to shed its stigma since the start of things like psychoanalysis and the mainstreaming of therapy and anti-depressants. These things may not have properly made it to Asia. Not to mention, societies based on Confucianism put so much emphasis on shame that a reasonable way out of it is to just kill yourself. The idea of treating mental illness and challenging suicide acceptance may be culturally repellant and tough to challenge. Japan also suffers from this and is famous for its suicide forests and very high suicide rate.
Students in Korea study until midnight or later since middle school. I've done that before I moved to US. Most of my friends did it.
You do that for six years until you are eligible to take the nationwide exam that is held once a year.
Similar to SAT, but with many more subjects and more depth.
If you are sick or feeling nervous on that day, then good luck. Take it again next year or a year after.
It's very common that you end up taking the exam two or more times because you are not satisfied with your score, which means you have to study on your own after high school graduation for another year or more.
If you are a boy, you have to serve in a military for roughly two years. Most of students go to army during their college years, so they usually have 6 or more years of college.
When you are near graduation, start looking for jobs.
Not so easy. Unlike in the US, as a new grad, you can apply for jobs once a year for big companies like Samsung. It's a yearly thing just like the college entrance exam.
And, you have to take an exam and pass to even submit your resume.
Oh, popular companies share the same date for their exams, so you can only apply for one.
Make a choice before you apply. It's to lower the competition (or so that you cannot have a competing offer to drive up your salary).
On your resume, you have to put things like:
- your picture: they grade how you look. some people do plastic surgery for this.
- your age: you have to be fresh out of college. over 30? no chance.
- your family info (not sure if still required): what does your father do? how much does he make? where do you live? is it a rent or owned?
- list goes on.
Now if you are really lucky and you get into those big companies, then they will pay you $40k-$50k a year which is very high compared to small companies where $20-$30k is average.
But, now you have no life. There is no such thing as work life balance.
There's no equity compensation in Korea. You get only the salary and bonus.
Cost of living and housing price is very high (avg $400-500k in Seoul).
You need to slave away the next 30 years to get out of debt. Then, you must retire at age 60. (retirement age is set in stone and you basically get fired).
Now do you really want to give birth to your children who will probably end up living the same life as yours?
I think this somewhat explains the extremely low birth rate and very high suicidal rate.
Apart from the reporting issues mentioned in other comments, Christianity has traditionally condemned suicide as a sin, while Confucianism has offered it as a possible solution in maintaining social harmony. Even though those religions may not exercise as much direct influence as they once did, they've shaped their respective cultures for centuries.
> I think there's something specific about suicide in the East that we just don't have in the West for whatever reason.
Are you sure? I'm not so sure. I think we just don't talk about it. There is a lot of suicide in the West. Staggeringly plenty.
Look at any statistics and you'll see that in most of the West, suicide is at the very peak of causes of death. 10th leading cause of death in 2013 officially.[1] And that doesn't count all those "Swerved left into oncoming traffic for no obvious reason" cases.
And pay attention to the news. Every "found dead in their apartment" news report for a famous person is a suicide. There's a lot of those.
But the West has a very strong ethic of not reporting suicide for fear of suicide epidemics. That's why celebrity suicides are never reported as suicides and why suicides in general rarely make it into the news.[2]
In short, suicide is a very real problem in the West too.
I literally just yesterday saw on national television news a report that suicide is the second leading cause of death for teenagers in the US.
Rather than invoking conspiracy theories, consider this much simpler theory: Western media doubles as entertainment and doesn't report much on suicide when they don't have to because it's fucking depressing.
This is a bullshit argument if I've ever seen one. Published suicide rates are accepted as non-controversial. Playing up "but but the US is worse because $conspiracy_theory" is completely asinine, although it gets up upvotes at places like HN and reddit who share a strong anti-US sentiment.
Yes Dorothy, there are places with worse suicide rates than others. Stop pretending suicide data is wrong because of your pet politics.
East Asia has one major cultural difference with the West that's relevant in this case. Status is taken to an extreme i.e. your job, your education, your clothes, your car, your lodgings, ...
In other words, "you are your clothes, your bank account, ...". When you don't have those things in East Asia, you're not that far from a homeless person in terms of status.
That's what I thought too - the people causing the problem and benefiting from it, trying oh-so-helpfully to give the victims an attitude adjustment to better deal with it.
Well, I hope more of them can move to the USA or someplace that has better opportunities. I'm not really saying that is a fix for SK's woes, but it may be a better outcome for the individual.
those are extremely biased unemployment rate. It's been known that unemployment rate conducted by government is totally a bullshit with too many restrictions to be categorized as "unemployed".
There are many articles (written in Korean) that list those restrictions, for example:
http://slownews.kr/19261
I believe joonhocho was speaking more about youth unemployment than overall unemployment. From the same web site, that rate appears to bounce around in the double digits:
EDIT: They also say things like "Be more appreciative that you were not born in North Korea!"