While doing the research for my article on suicide for Groove Korea, I noticed that while suicide in South Korea had stabilised in the last few years, the data showed that student suicide was climbing steadily. Reports on youth suicide began to feature regularly in local media from late 2011, when a 14 year old boy killed himself to avoid bullying at school.
Earlier this month, Arirang provided an overview of the spike in youth suicide in the last decade:
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It’s pretty shocking to see how high the suicide rates are. My friend works at a public high school in one of the larger cities (I believe it’s all girls) and she had a student commit suicide a couple months ago. Luckily I haven’t had to go through that at my rural school.