By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
Getting a job is stressful, sometimes too stressful prompting some to feel the urge to commit suicide. According to a survey of 1,082 jobseekers in their 20s by online recruiting company JobKorea, 47.3 percent of respondents said they had felt a strong impulse to kill themselves.
About 52.7 percent of the pollees said they had never felt the urge to commit suicide, whereas 21.9 percent answered they felt the impulse often; 17.8 percent once; 5.5 percent very often; and 2.1 percent periodically.
Some people push themselves a step further and put the impulse into action. A 23-year-old named Kim was found dead Monday on the rooftop of a building in Gwangjin-gu, Seoul. The university senior was said to have had a row with her mother when she was scolded for not being active in her job searching. The police said that the stress of having to get an occupation must have driven her to commit suicide.
Twenty-five-year old Seo also killed herself last Sunday when she failed her entrance examination for a pharmaceutical department at college. She had already graduated from a university majoring in humanities, but since she couldn't get a job, she tried to switch her school to be a chemist, only to fail.
Another jobseeker identified as Bae also killed herself on the same day leaving a note, saying that she should have applied for the public servant examination not corporations.
To the survivors, the reality of having to prepare or search for jobs is difficult. About 93.4 percent said that they are severely stressed. Seong, a 27 year-old jobseeker who is preparing to be a teacher, said that she often feels depressed. ``I thought, at this time of my life, I would get a steady job and make career plans. But just look at me; sitting in the library all day long memorizing stuff fearing I might fail,'' she said.
Prof. Lee Hong-shik of Yonsei University said that for jobseekers, courage is needed not a sense of failure. Repetition of failure can result in depression that leads to suicide and that the jobseekers' whole family should deal with it.
``Getting a good job is not everything in one's life and you shouldn't just linger on that one issue, but use diverse perspectives in self evaluation,'' Prof. Choi Jun-ho of Hanyang University Medical Center said.