Depression: leading cause of suicides

South Korea’s suicide rate remains the highest among OECD members despite the government’s efforts to counter it. Everyday dozens of people take their own lives, leaving those left behind to suffer the loss and severe depression. The following is the second in a three-part series on suicide. — ED.

By Kim Tae-jong

Park Chun-hwa, 73, had long suffered depression and tremendous stress after she lost her two sons who took their lives due to economic hardship.

“After losing my two sons, I found no reason to live anymore. I wanted to follow them,” she said. “Actually, I put my suicidal thoughts into action twice.”

She said she thought taking her own life would be a lot easier than living with such tragic memories.

What made her move forward was her daughter. “I saw my daughter crying next to me when I woke up from my second attempt to kill myself. At that moment, I realized my life was not just mine,” she recalled. “I decided that I must not make my daughter feel the pain and sorrow again.”

As was shown in Park’s case, depression is one of the main reasons people choose extreme methods to escape from it once and for all.

Psychiatric disorders

Experts say suicide is never the consequence of one single cause or stressor. Still, they agree that acute psychosocial crises and psychiatric disorders are major causes of suicidal behavior.

“Key precipitating factors are depression and stressful life events. In fact a large proportion of people who have attempted suicide suffered from depression,” said Yoon Dae-hyun, a senior official from the Korea Association for Suicide Prevention (KASP), who is also a psychiatrist at Seoul National University Hospital.

According to KASP’s survey of those who have attempted suicide, over 80 percent of them were found to be suffering from a mental illness.

The survey was conducted on 1,921 people who were transferred to emergency units at eight hospitals nationwide between January 2010 and February 2011. About 43 percent of them suffered from depression and 6.3 percent had bipolar disorders.

“It is obvious that those with depression are highly likely to commit suicide, and therefore, we need to help them overcome the disease to prevent them from doing so,” Yoon said.

Yoon and other experts said that the government needs to put forward measures to help people fight depression more effectively.

Sociological factors

Although depression is a major factor behind suicide attempts, experts also point out that it is necessary to understand suicide in a sociological context.

Experts say suicides happen more frequently in countries where social norms are changing fast through economic development and people are forced to face fierce competition.

The high suicide rate in Korea reflects that people are not happy due to growing competition and economic inequalities even though they have become more affluent than in the past.

“Simply, more and more people think they are unhappy. They face more conflicts, in the family, at work and in relationships, and that’s the dark side of the fast development of our country,” said Ahn Myoung-ock, a professor at the School of Public Health and Welfare at CHA University.

With the fast industrialization and dominant materialism, people focus on the importance of money and achievements, disregarding traditional values and losing respect for life, she argued.

Even young children are forced to win competitions with their peers from a very early age — typically working from early morning until late at night to simply get into a top university and secure a well-paying job.

Experts say that explains the high suicide rate among teenagers. Some high school students take their own lives around the time when they take university entrance exams amid extreme pressure to perform well.

Suicides were the leading cause of death among people in their teens, 20s and 30s. More than five out of every 100,000 teens killed themselves last year, while the rates for people in their 20s and 30s were measured at 24.4 percent and 29.6 percent, respectively.

“In a society where people from a young age are required to face fierce competition, they often feel extreme stress, especially when they experience a failure and they don’t know how to properly cope with it,” Park Yun-ok, a counselor at the Seoul Child and Adolescent Mental Health Center, said.

Lack of safety net

One of the obvious trends in the high suicide rate is an uptick in the number of elderly people who kill themselves. According to recent statistics, a total of 5,051 suicides by elderly citizens aged 60 or over were reported in 2009, up from 433 in 1990.

Experts say the country is fast aging but lacks supportive measures for senior citizens.

With the life expectancy increasing, more and more elderly people are left unprotected due to a lack of social safety programs.

“As they get older, people are financially challenged after a comparatively early retirement, and of course many of them have health problems,” said Park ji-young, a social welfare professor at Sangji University. “But they have fewer options to rely on as many of them can’t expect their children’s support in the absence of any effective social welfare programs. Society marginalizes them and so it is not so strange that many elderly people consider committing suicide.”