How to ease social pressures

By Deauwand Myers

World Suicide Prevention Day was on September 10, and World Mental Health Day is on October 10. It seems appropriate then to talk about the broad state of our societal mental health, particularly its implications for politics in Korea. More on that later.

Recent polls have President Moon Jae-in's approval dip into Trump territory, the very low 40-percent level. Korean presidents are constitutionally limited to one five-year term in office. At the halfway mark, Korean presidents lose some of their political mojo with their power waning into lame duck status.

But this sudden dip in Moon's approval rating is more than just the usual ebb and flow of public opinion. President Moon expended a great deal of his political capital on an honorable, but predictably futile, effort of rapprochement with North Korea.

It takes a large ego to run for national public office, particularly one with the geopolitical complexity of Korea. With no evidence, (save the bloom of domestic and international goodwill President Moon received after the disastrous, precipitous fall of former President Park Geun-hye, disgraced, impeached, and imprisoned for graft and breaches of national security), Moon believed he could do what no Korean or American president has been able to do for decades.

President Moon thought he could convince North Korea to join the global community, end its military buildup, and most importantly, install a verifiable, irreversible denuclearization scheme on the Kim Jong-un regime's nuclear program.

I can't tell you how many letters of concern I received from readers calling my writing on this matter cynical and shortsighted.

I simply stated the obvious: After generations of sanctions, famine, disease, and fascist, antidemocratic behavior, including political prisoner camps (ostensibly death camps) and summary executions, the Kim regime has become accustomed to starvation and skirting international law to prop up its rudimentary nuclear weapons program. At all costs, it will continue to do so.

Simply put, North Korea sees the atomic bomb as its only card for survival. Puppies, flowers, smiles, fruitless summits with American presidents, and "love letters" between Kim and Trump cannot change the aforementioned immutable facts. And as of the writing of this column, I have been proven right, though I take no comfort or joy in that reality.

Worse for President Moon, he wasted a great deal of his time, political capital, and attention on inter-Korean relations to the neglect and detriment of domestic affairs, most pertinent to his political legacy and the body politic: employment, and the attendant stress endured by too many Koreans procuring it and enduring it.

Which leads us back to the international days focused on suicide prevention and mental health, especially in the workplace. Similar to Japan, when Korea was an impoverished country, ravaged by war and a crumbling infrastructure, suicide rates were low and birthrates comparatively high.

If one superimposes Korea's economic rise with suicide rates, both were meteoric. There's a correlation between economic progress and mental stress, and with the highest suicide rate in the developed world (Japan is second), there's a great cause for concern in Korean society to address these problems.

Suicide is a complex issue. But there are some easily identifiable factors that can be ameliorated by government policy and tighter regulations.

For the uninitiated: Young Koreans study more than they sleep. College admissions can make or break a person's entire future. Wealth and access can help determine what college one gets into, and tertiary education is considered the only means to acquire gainful employment. Meanwhile, the tuition costs of Korean universities have risen much higher than inflation (a phenomenon on steroids in America).

Moreover, in recent years, college education equaling gainful employment has proven to be a hollow social contract, wherein lots of young college graduates have trouble finding work, or the work they do find has little or no benefits, no job security, unpaid overtime, wage theft, no possibility of promotion, and a host of other poor workplace conditions.

These are all made worse if you happen to be a woman, where even now, Korean women have some of the worse wage parity with their male counterparts of any OECD country.

In short, social upward mobility in Korea has created a toxic brew of stress and a fetishizing of outward beauty. It's no wonder that poor mental health and low birthrates plague Korea and lots of countries like it.

For sure, some of this is cultural and can't be remedied by government intervention alone.

But better policies, like covering mental healthcare in the national health program, mandating equitable remuneration, the abolishing of unpaid overtime, strict monitoring of wage theft, imposing tuition hike caps on public universities and colleges, and most importantly, a strong enforcement regime with meaningful, punitive consequences for violators, would go a long way into easing the social pressures enumerated herein.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul.