Jung Min-ho has worked as a staff writer at The Korea Times since 2012, mostly covering social and political issues. He currently belongs to the Politics & City Desk where he covers topics such as health, labor and human rights. Prior to joining the team, he was responsible for covering North Korea and sports. His article about a biosecurity breach of Middle East respiratory syndrome won him an award from the Korea Science Journalists Association in 2016. He is also the co-author of the book, "Medical Pioneers of Korea" (2019). He served as the head of the international relations committee at the Journalists Association of Korea from 2021 to 2023.
INTERVIEW New suicide prevention chief puts responsibility on state
Jung Yoon-soon, new chairman of the Korea Life Respect and Hope Foundation, speaks during a recent interview at his office in Seoul. Courtesy of Korea Life Respect and Hope Foundation
By Jung Min-ho
Jung Yoon-soon calls suicide rate barometer of social health, vows stronger national prevention push
Korea must treat suicide not as an individual failing but as a government responsibility, said Jung Yoon-soon, chairman of the state-run Korea Life Respect and Hope Foundation.
In a recent interview with The Korea Times, Jung, who took office last month, pointed to the persistently high number of Korean people who take their own lives. The rate has consistently been higher than other OECD member countries since 2003, and Jung said that blaming individuals’ “personal problems” is not tenable.
“This is not about a few people making bad choices,” Jung said. “It is a structural failure, and the government must take primary responsibility for fixing it.”
According to official data, the 2024 suicide rate was 29.1 per 100,000 people, with 14,872 deaths — an average of 41 lives lost every day. Although preliminary figures for 2025 suggest a modest decline of around 6.5 percent, Jung cautioned against premature optimism.
Fixing it requires a whole-of-government response, he noted. The suicide rate should be read not just as a mental health statistic but as a key indicator of how Korean society is functioning as a whole.
“It is similar to the birthrate,” he said. “People decide to have children only when they feel there is hope for the future — when jobs, housing, schools and the basic conditions of life are in place.” In the same way, he suggested, Korea’s suicide rate reflects whether people feel any realistic hope that their own future will get any better.
“All the structural factors are mixed into that one number,” Jung said. “It is not a tally of individual failures but a single, stark signal about our society.”
A man runs past an emergency "lifeline" phone installed on Mapo Bridge in Seoul, Sept. 25, 2025. Newsis
One of the most effective strategies would be strengthening state protections for a critical high-risk population, such as the families of suicide victims.
“Bereaved families face a suicide risk that is 22 times higher than the general population,” he said. “This is an area where we must intervene more systematically.”
Another vulnerable group is the people who have attempted suicide and survived, he added, who require long-term, coordinated follow-up care rather than being left on their own. He emphasized that support after a suicide should be treated as a core pillar of national strategy, not a secondary measure.
“Someone who has attempted suicide does not simply return to normal life after leaving the emergency room,” Jung said. “They require continuous monitoring and support. The same applies to their families.”
In practice, if someone arrives at an emergency room following a suicide attempt, that case should immediately trigger a chain of responses linking doctors, local police and fire services as well as health officials in their community. At present, those links are weak, with information seldom being shared outside individual agencies. To improve this, Jung is pushing for tighter data-sharing among all relevant institutions, backed by legal revisions that would allow quicker, clearer information flows.
He also wants each municipality to designate an official as a dedicated “suicide prevention officer,” tasked with coordinating welfare and health services, expanding frontline staffing and making sure that no high-risk case falls through the cracks due to communication issues.
At the same time, Jung wants the foundation to boost its internal data capacity and upgrade its artificial intelligence-based system for monitoring signs that an individual is at risk, so that sudden spikes in danger can be detected and flagged more precisely. The goal, he said, is to build an evidence-based platform on which future policies can be designed and refined, with alerts for sudden surges in particular groups or areas so that the data can be directly integrated into government responses.
Beyond institutions, Jung repeatedly returns to the idea of a cultural shift in which citizens learn to recognize “warning signals” from families and friends around them. The foundation plans to expand “life guardianship” education programs nationwide.
“If one person responds when someone reaches out for help, that can prevent a death,” he said. “This is a responsibility that belongs to all of us — but it must be led by the state.”
If you or someone you know may be at risk of suicide, contact Korea's Suicide Crisis hotline at 109. For foreign language assistance with emergency services, call the 1330 Korea Travel Hotline, or call Danuri Portal's helpline at 1577-1366 to connect with multilingual counseling and referral services.