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KMID : 1146320170050010001
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Journal of Health Technology Assessment
2017 Volume.5 No. 1 p.1 ~ p.6
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Why Being Ranked the World 1st in the Suicide Rate?
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Suh Guk-Hee
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Abstract
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The World Health Organization found higher suicide rates among the elderly in rapidly industrialized Asian countries such as China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, compared to the corresponding rates of recently industrializing Asian countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka. As a case in point, suicide rates in South Korea have been the highest in the world since 2003 and are rising especially among older people. Since the middle of the 20th century, regional industrialization?the so called modernization?has taken place in Asian countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, and is in the process of happening in mainland China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. This has caused a rapid social and economic transition towards transforming a person who used to be tied to a family, a community and a set of traditional values, into an individual with the liberty to live a life of their own in pursuit of acquiring goods and relying on services. The process of rapid industrialization in East Asia witnessed ever increasing broken family ties. The consequences of industrialization in East Asia have brought about urbanization, the collapse of patriarchy and the empowerment of younger people, women and the ‘working classes’. The Industrial Revolution in the West broke strong family ties and small intimate communities whose members depended on each other for survival, in the same way that modernization has done in East Asia. On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions, which means people become satisfied when reality matches expectations. Dramatic development caused expectations balloon so that all the achievements in recent decades translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment and into greater dissatisfaction after experiencing losses during economic crisis in 1997 and 2008 in Korea.
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KEYWORD
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Suicide, Asia, Korea, Happiness, Satisfaction, Economy
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