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 ???????.

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!

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.

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?