More young people call anti-suicide network

By Bahk Eun-ji

More young people in their 20s and 30s are calling the “Han River SOS hotline” through telephones installed on bridges crossing the Han River in Seoul as an anti-suicide measure, while the overall number of calls has declined, a civic group said Monday.

According to data from LifeLine Korea, a nonprofit organization providing a free, 24-hour telephone crisis support service, the number of calls for counseling through the hotline was 633 in 2019, down nearly 30 percent from 2017's 901. Despite the drop in the total, the number of young people visiting the bridge while contemplating suicide is increasing.

An anti-suicide phone run by LifeLine Korea is installed on Mapo Bridge in Seoul. Korea Times file

Among the total, 36 percent of callers in 2019 were in their 20s, while they accounted for 28.3 percent in 2017. During the same period, callers in their 30s also increased to 8.2 percent from 6.5 percent. Last year, nearly half of the calls were from young people in their 20s and 30s.

The number of times rescue workers were dispatched to call sites is also increasing steadily. Last year, 31.9 percent of calls resulted in rescue workers going to the scene, up from 25.8 percent in 2017. When a call comes in via the SOS hotline, rescue teams are sent to the scene after a psychological evaluation of the person calling.

Experts mainly attributed the increasing number of young people using the hotline to serious employment difficulties. A survey conducted by LifeLine Korea showed the biggest concerns among people in their 20s and 30s were “career and academic pressure” and “financial problems.”

“It seems many young people feel frustrated in an environment in which the unemployment rate keeps increasing. They also have anxiety about their livelihoods and feel a lot of pressure to achieve social success as much as their parents' generation did,” said Shin Eun-jung, deputy head of the Central Suicide Prevention Center.

“As the economic situation gets worse due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are paying attention to whether the younger generation will feel they only have such bad choices.”

The SOS Lifeline Phones were first introduced on the main bridges of the Han River in July 2011 in order to prevent suicide attempts. Since then, 75 phones on 20 bridges had been installed across the country as of March.