By Grace Dennett
“I am sorry. I am doing this because life is too tough”: this was the Inscription written on a family photo by a ten-year-old South Korean girl right before she threw herself off the top balcony in her apartment building. A mere fourth grader, pushed far beyond her limits by the demands of school work, found her life too hopeless and unbearable to continue living, so she ended it. It is almost impossible to fathom that kind of desperation, yet she’s not the only one: hundreds of teenagers commit suicide every day. There is a huge amount of stress put on teenagers, whether from parental, social, or school-related pressures. As suicide and depression rate percentages begin to increase, I worry for the future of teens everywhere, especially in South Korea, which has been ranked number one in suicide rates for the past eleven years among countries part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. How is this happening, and what can we do to prevent it in South Korea and in other countries around the world?
Suicide is the fourth most common cause of death in South Korea: 40 South Koreans take their lives each day. It is the number one cause of death for people ages 10 to 30; the majority of these are students in South Korea. Many of these students have suicidal thoughts because of low social status and bullying, high stress, inadequate sleep, alcohol use, and smoking; all of these are linked to school pressures and the influence of classmates, and parents or teachers.
Society in South Korea is extremely competitive: children are taught to find ‘rivals’ from elementary school and to measure themselves against their peers for motivation purposes. This destroys friendships among students and creates a lot of isolation and intense bullying. Many South Korean children never have a childhood to speak of; rather, that period of time is replaced by an intense 12 year “cram session” in preparation for their university entrance exam. It is common for a South Korean student to attend eight hours of school, followed by an additional four hours of private tutoring, followed by several hours of studying, six days a week.
Students are encouraged to become “salarymen” once they graduate college: people who dedicates their lives to their companies in exchange for job security. It’s depressing for a student when all he has to look forward to — if he does well in school, and if he makes it to college — is the pressure and monotony of becoming a “salaryman”. Young students of South Korea look to their futures and see nothing but more work and stress and pressure ahead of them. There is no time for playing, no time for passions or hobbies; life is all centered around money, success, and power.
Data from Kang Eun-hee of South Korea’s Saenuri Party — a centre-right, conservative political party — revealed that 17 students committed suicide due to stress from receiving poor school grades, which also accounts for 23 percent of 61 students who took their own lives in 2015.
Many students turn to video games to escape from this intense and soul-numbing stress, immersing themselves in other worlds with their internet friends. While this is better than depression and suicide, it can cause loneliness, serious addiction to technology, and a complete lack of ambition or progression in life. It is not healthy to apply this much pressure to anyone, especially children.
In the United States, suicide in teenagers is not very unusual either. According to a survey of the American Psychological Association, students of the United States have stress surpassing that of adults during their school year. And according to UNICEF studies, they were ranked near the bottom as compared to other developed nations, in respects to “well-being, life-satisfaction, and relationship quality”. There has also been a high rise suicide connected to bullying in schools, particularly among LGBT teenagers. Like South Korean teens, American teens are also faced with extreme amounts of stress from school, and pressure from parents or teachers; as a result they are becoming depressed because of serious bullying and social problems. It should be made a number one priority, of all schools and the country, to prevent these factors from escalating into teen suicide.
To combat their teen suicide rates, the South Korean government created STOPS (Strategies to Prevent Suicide). It is a program that increases public awareness, reports any media which sensationalizes suicide, checks on people with high risk of suicide, strictly prohibits any instrument that could be used to commit suicide, and improves the rehabilitation of any depressed patients.This is a fairly new program, and South Korea is still waiting to see if it will make a difference in the rate of suicide. In the meantime, we can realize how detrimental and dangerous it is to sacrifice childhood for the pressure of school performance, and we can also spread awareness of depression and bullying as factors which can contribute to suicide. Although South Korea is doing so well in its economic development and technological advancement, what cost is it willing to pay for this success? Suicide is a horrifying price. American schools should learn from this example and act accordingly.
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