Analyze this
This is a place for the lighter ideas that life brings my way, but it’s also a place for me to let go of the frustrations that sometimes make my fists clench up into a ball.Take our current obsession with tragedy, for example. Newspapers thrive on it. If something bad happens it is certain to land on the front page for everyone to see. With so much bad news, it’s actually a miracle that the majority of people in this industry aren’t going nuts. But from my point of view it’s like North Korea nausea. After reporting that North Korea has fired another missile for the zillionth time, who really cares? And when another person jumps off a bridge it becomes just another number for consumption. Today, most of us are so numb to death that even murderers don’t surprise us much any more.
But our obsession with tragedy also has implications for our personal lives. The truth is that some of us are falling off the edge. But we don’t know how to deal with it, and society keeps telling us that we can’t ask for help.
It has come to the point where South Korea now has the highest suicide rate among all the 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries. The country’s suicide rate has risen drastically in the past decade. The latest data says that an average of 24.3 people per 100,000 die every year from suicide. In 2008, 12,858 Koreans committed suicide, a 49 percent hike from the 1998 figure, which was 8,622. It was the fourth most common cause of death in Korea in 2008, accounting for 5.2 percent of all deaths in the nation. This follows cancer, the No. 1 cause, with 28 percent, and is just ahead of brain and heart illnesses. But what is alarming is that suicide was the leading cause of death for people in their 20s and 30s that year, accounting for 40.7 percent and 28.7 percent of deaths in the two respective age brackets. So you know it’s more than just a midlife crisis that is pushing people over the edge.
From the numbers, it’s fair to say we aren’t doing well. Slowly but surely our insides are going kaput - and the government is still only concerned with economic growth.
This kind of devotion to numbers has given birth to a cold culture that makes us love world rankings more than a bald man loves Rogaine. The media is no help here, as it spends a great deal of time dissecting why the country has recovered from the global crisis at the fastest rate among OECD countries, but then decides to turn a blind eye on a social problem that will come back to bite us in the not-too-distant future if we don’t address it now.
Somebody should explain why sales of Lexapro, the No. 1 anti-depressant in the country, are on the rise, with sales of roughly 15 million pills per year. That means one out of three people could have gulped a pill to get peace of mind - but shhhhhhh, it’s a secret.
What’s even more alarming is that the Health Ministry estimates that about 2.5 percent of the population, or 1.25 million people, suffer from depression, of which only 1.1 percent are being treated. No wonder the Lee Myung-bak administration is so keen on putting a lid on nighttime rallies. After all, everyone is a ticking time bomb here.
But this is not the time to consult a self-help book, even if it was written by an expert. It’s time for a public debate about what has brought us here. Getting it out into the open is crucial because the shrinks here that I have talked to think there simply isn’t enough discussion on the idea that seeking professional help is similar to getting treated for a cold.
In South Korea, the social stigma of seeing a shrink still outweighs the rationality of seeking help. Going to a psychiatrist automatically brands a person as crazy. The Korean Neuropsychiatric Association has tried for years to change the Korean term for psychiatry (jeongsingwa) in an effort to make the act of getting help more acceptable. I hope it works, because I know a bunch of people who are waiting.
By Brian Lee [africanu@joongang.co.kr]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.
Standards Board Policy (0/250자)