This is not filed under ‘completely random crap’ because it is no more than that - just something that tweaked my curiosity last night at dinner (at a little known but lovely little Italian place near city hall and that big Starbucks between it and the Press Centre). It may be the after effects of that Jacob’s Creek Shiraz Cabernet talking here, so don’t take this too seriously.
Last month it was reported that Korea had a record high suicide rate in 2003. It is now the fifth largest cause of death, with 11,000 taking their own lives. The article linked contains some frightening statistics on how the rate has jumped over the last ten years.
But that isn’t the point here. Korea’s isn’t the number 1 suicide rate in the world. It ranks fourth behind Hungary, Japan and Finland. I’d heard years before that Finland was quite high, and couldn’t understand reasons why. Is it the cold? The thousands of lakes?
Anyway last night we were talking about commonalities between all four of these high countries. What could they have in common? Economic cycles are different, as are geographic conditions and of course locations. And then it hit me: all four countries belong to the oft-disputed but long-proposed Ural-Altaic Language (Super-)Family.
What does this mean?
16 Comments
For Finland, it may just be the doom and gloom living near the arctic circle tends to impart. Living without sunlight for the greater part of the year does bad things to people’s mental conditions perhaps. I really think looking for coorelations between countries with high suicide rates is a wild goose chase. The causes of suicide are pretty diverse and complicated and a reason that one country suffers from high suicides can be quite different for another country that also suffers from suicides. I know we tend to seek some sort of framework of thought to work from and conceptualize trends into some sort of cover-all paradigm but in this case, I think that just won’t work. Sure there are the basic underlying psychological causes: stress, depression, etc. Yet these causes can be induced by different things.
In any case, what has always perlexed me was why China has the highest rate of female suicides in the world. In fact, the suicide rate in China is rather unremarkable(though frighteningly rising), however, it is the only nation where female suicide rates outpace male suicide rates. Everywhere else the ratio is far inverse of the imperical observations in China. I’ve thought of a number of reasons for this, but none of them have been satisfactory and even now I am still stumped. I have a recent working theory that it maybe a correlation between the combination of Confucianism and Communism, but unfortunately figures aren’t available for either Vietnam or North Korea so there is no way to verify this rather esoteric idea.
Jing: yes of course, cover-all paradigms don’t usually work. However, we were just struck by the amazing coincidence that all top four countries should be members of the Ural-Altaic family. This is much more interesting than the fact that they are all UN member states, or might be OECD member states (not sure if they are), but it’s probably just an interesting - but meaningless in terms of predictive or therapeutic utility - coincidence.
Re: North Korea. I’d wager that suicide in South Korea is higher than that in the North. Why would this be? If there was logic to suicide, you’d imagine people in abject poverty might be more inclined to take that route, but instead they usually do all they can to prolong their lives. The same goes, interestingly, for birthrates.
China’s sad female suicides are probably a side effect of the economic reforms since the 1970’s. One of my Chinese teachers told me that companies tend to lay off female workers first. The perverse logic behind that is that ‘decent’ girls (should) have a husband to support them. Without job and social security many woman opt for a can of fertilizer… *sigh*
BTW: Female suicides seem to be breathtakingly high in Muslim countries, but there are no reliable statistics . I wouldn’t bet on some mysterious link between linguistics and one’s view on life.
Moreover Confucianism basically prohibits suicide with the exeption of the necessety to set a moral example.
Regarding Finland, if the suicide rate is because of living near the Artic cirle that would suggest Swden’s suicide rate would be even higher since Stockholm is even further north, but interestingly enough Sweden’s is not all that high considering its depressive reputation. (ranked in the mid 20s in suicide rates.)
As to Chinese suicide rates for women, this seems to be a relatively ancient problem, stemming from the conflicts between mothers-in-law and young wives in traditional chinese families. There is a lot of literature on this traditional pattern, and while I know that more recent suicide data seems to suggest a new less family centered trend, it would suggest a certain tradition. Just googling I found a couple of links:
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p990101b.html
http://www.medserv.dk/modules......p;sid=1115
As to the suicidal tendencies of the Magyars this has been a very ancient mystery:
http://www.phespirit.info/gloo.....cle_02.htm
Marmot isn’t the first person to note the Finno-Ugric connection, there is a fair amount of speculation about a Finno-Ugric suicide gene, but possibly the first I have sen to extend this to Japan and Korea
personally since in Hungary assimilitaed Jews have similar suicide rates, I would suspect it is cultural.
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.o.....gene.shtml
Antti hunjangnim might be the competent expert about this topic:
1. He’s a Finn.
2. He’s an anthropologist.
3. He’s lived in Korea and studied the Koreans.
4. He has a few (or more) things to say about the popularly assumed “mystical” Finnish-Hungarian-Korean-Japanese language family.
Sugarshin: a fantastic suggestion! Why didn’t I think of that? I don’t know if he reads this blog much (tends to limit himself to Oranckay, doesn’t he?). If someone can alert him to this I’d be grateful.
Antti: we need your input. Suicide rates aside, I have long been intrigued by the ?橫mystical?? Finnish-Hungarian-Korean-Japanese language family.
Actually Hinrich Hoffman, I’ve approached that angle before and what you say doesn’t hold any water. If economic restructuring leads to an enormous surge in female suicide, the evidence simply doesn’t bear that out. China is hardly the only country have gone through this sort of phase and isn’t alone in being a patriarchal society. Also your assertion that female suicide rates in muslim countries is high is simply flat out wrong. Suicide is almost non-existant in most muslim countries and for muslim nations where WHO figures exist, the female rate is hovering a 0. (0 out of 100,000 in Egypt, .1 out of 100,000 for Iran). Thus the relationship between a woman’s social standing and suicide simply does not exist.
About the relations between women and mother-in-laws, I think this is a bit too generalistic to work. For one thing, the same social phenomenon exists almost universally but you don’t see women killing themselves around the globe because of a cantakerous mother-in-law. It isn’t even a matter of degrees, as South Korea is argueably an even more orthodox confucian society than mainland China is today, and the figures don’t support this assertion.
My best wager, is probably that it is some sort of social distortion caused by communism. Some may argue that it is because of some unproven Ural-Altaic legacy that drives certain societies to suicide, but I perceive the most likely culprit is the dramatic shift from a communist society to that of a free market one. Suicide rates in eastern Europe, Russia, and the central Asian republics are notoriously high, and suicide has risen in China as it has become more economically liberal. The prevalence of suicide in South Korea and Japan maybe explained away by cultural methods, but for the former Soviet block, I think the end of communism and the sweeping changes that ensued is responsible for the spike in suicides. Something which China is also subject too, and perhaps local conditions have forced women to be even more vulnerable. As Mao once said, women hold up half the sky, perhaps it is more egalitarian that women kill themselves in equal numbers too?
Asia by Blog
Asia by Blog is a twice weekly feature, posted on Monday and Thursday, providing links to Asian blogs and their views on the news in this fascinating region. Please send me an email if you would like to be notified of new editions. Previous editions ca…
A look at the suicide rates by country shows that countries with crushing poverty are actually LESS likely to have high suicide rates (check out the stats from the WHO site).
I think it can be a matter of the general expectations of the populace, in Korea anyway. Expectations of success are quite high in Korea, far higher than what the country can actually provide. EVERYONE wants to get into the best colleges, the best jobs, etc. There are no acceptable alternatives it seems. When these expectations are not met, severe depression follows.
I think it is certainly one of the biggest factors in Korea, if not THE biggest.
As a finn majoring korean studies I could try to give some kind of an answer to the question.
I googled a bit and found this study about suicides in Europe and learned that the most of the suicides appear in J-shaped area going throught Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Ukrainia, Slovenia to Austria. The reasons to the high rate of suicides mensioned in the study were (among other things) cultural similarities, like the way of solving problems and high alcohol usage. Not commenting on the Finno-Korean language connections (trusting in Antti) but they did mention the Finno-Ugric language group in the study as a unifying factor.
And about these two Asian countries, from my experience Japanese and Koreans do drink a lot and I have understood also that the importance of the hierarchy and honor play much more important role in their culture than for example in Europe or in the States so that makes this “honorable death” much more acceptable especially when it is made to set a moral example to the others (like killing yourself instead of being raped). And then Buddhism being one of the main religions in these two countries, well yeah, making suicide doesn’t seem to be the end of the world to someone who believes in reincarnation.
And in general suicide risk is high also if you are retired, unemployed, divorced, childless, urbanite and living alone (so practically everyone has a risk making suicide according to this, at least most of the finns!!).
So if we try to find similarities between Finland and Korea, I would say drinking, high divorce rate, low birth rate and espesially in Finland unemployment (well that doesn’t match with Korea with it’s 3 percent or so unemployment rate) but maybe also stress being successful in study and in work. Oh there seems to be too many reasons to be depressed about…
Hope I wasn’t too confusing making you guys depressed and driving you to suicides!!! BTW thanks Marmot for a good blog, keep going!
Simple. I’d bet that a high proportion of suicide notes around the world include the phrase “No one understands me!” If you are a speaker of a Ural-Altaic language, this is almost literally true - certainly with regard to your immediate neighbours. (Basques don’t have the same problem because there are very very few monoglot Basques.)
Well, now, there can also be complex interplay of factors. I don’t know what official safety net exists in Finland, but I imagine in Sweden it’s pretty good. Maybe SAD is a factor in both nations, but is mitigated by other institutions in some nations better than in others.
I think in Korea also there is a lack of support for people with certain kinds of dilemmas or problems. It’s not just failure to achieve the BEST of something, like not getting into a Uni in Seoul or not getting the best jobthough I find there are unreasonable expectations for a lot of people. This may in fact explain why so many students in lesser universities perform so poorlywhat’s the point if you’re just at Babo Countryside University, anyway?and this is not something even the most optimistic rhetoric by the school’s administration will banish. Not even the best slogan will fix that problem.
There’s also the question of how people deal with failure, with “dishonour”, that kind of thing. For one thing, the precedents you see with mayors and CEOs killing themselves when their governments orcompanies are finally outed as being crooked likely both reflect but also reinforce the idea that suicide is an available method of dealing with, and perhaps expiating, dishonour.
Social conservativism also opens the door to even more dishonour: while movies don’t really reflect reality all that well, I’m still going to mention that recently I watched the movie “??????????” with my girlfriend; when the girl gives up and resigns herself to her situation, and moment comes thereafter when she could run off and escape, I said, “Run away!” and my girlfriend asked, “Where can she run to? She can’t go home. She has nowhere to go.” And I knew, of course, this was so, and yet it struck me, with my North American upbringing, as insane: the girl was sold into slavery, essentially, and her family will judge her for being victimized in this way? But my girlfriend took it as a given.
It should be clear I suspect cultural and institutional factors at work, though they likely interplay with environmental factors. There’s going to be more SAD in Korea than in Thailand, and more SAD in Finland than in Korea. I’d be surprised if there’s a genetic factor, and the easy way to check would be to check diasporic populations of each of the group. Do Koreans/Finns/Japanese/Hungarians kill themselves with the same frequency in other nations, especially those who grew up there? Are their suicides in other nations disproportionate to the suicides of other groups? It’d be easy to find out, I suppose, if one were bent on supporting or debunking the theory.
As for suicides in the North, I recently read an interview with a young North Korean defector who noted something interesting: he said he was shocked when, after arriving in the South, which is, from his perspective, lacking in absolutely nothing, he heard of parents who killed their children when they committed suicide. (He actually said it was the worst thing about the South.) He said that in the impoverished North when parents committed suicide, at least the children were thought to deserve to be allowed to live; this can’t be an uncommon practice, actually, as he said there’s even a word for such “left behind children” (though it may also refer to children who have to beg for other reasons, like parents who’ve starved to death or been dragged away for criticizing the government). The word, incidentally, was ???????.
Mainly of interest to the sane
The following links are of interest only to the sane and semi-sane. Marmot’s got a couple of good links on, one about the newest trend in Korean plastic surgery and other assery; and another on the Taiwanese government’s idea of…
that death rate seemed to drop as the economy in korea improved from the asian flu and then the deaths started increasing as the world went into a “funk” because the US economy slowed down.
Simon’s China and East Asia Briefing: 30th Nov 2004
The following is a digest of highlights from the past month’s Asia by Blog series over at simonworld.mu.nu. The round-up has four key areas of focus: China, Taiwan Hong Kong (Politics, Economy lifestyle, History sport culture, Information), Kore…
By the way, it did hit #1 in the world, in 2005. Not sure if you posted on that elsewhere, but here’s a link.