South Korean born Russian athlete Viktor Ahn wins gold at the Sochi Olympics. Credit: Yonhap News Agency/IPS.

By Ahn Mi Young
SEOUL, Mar 12 2014 (IPS)

Old family bonds still seem to run deep in the South Korea of today. For evidence, one need only look at the yearning of the elderly to meet their long separated kin in North Korea during last month’s historic family reunions.

Yet, in a country that has rapidly evolved in the past six decades from a largely static rural community to the world’s most wired economic power, people today alternate between traditional, collectivist mindsets and young, individualist values.South Korea tops the world's suicide rate: 33.5 in every 100,000 people commit suicide every year in the country.

It was back to the past for many when family reunions between the South and the North were held Feb. 20-25 at North Korea’s Mount Kumgang resort. These families met for the first time since the 1950-1953 Korean War.

Such reunions had been suspended the past three years because of strained ties between the two sides. The South Korean unification ministry said 763 Koreans from both sides participated. They had waited 60 years to spend 19 hours together.

South Korean Kim Young-Hwan, 90, was speechless after meeting his wife, Kim Myong-Ok, 87, whom he had left behind in North Korea during the war. He had married again in South Korea and had five children with his second wife. But his North Korean wife continued to live with their only son without marrying again.

“I came here with the deepest sadness in my heart. I am feeling so sorry,” Kim Young-Hwan said.

South Korean Gang Neung-Hwan, 93, could recognise his son, now 64, even though he had never seen him before. Gang had left his pregnant wife in the North during the war. “My son and I look so alike! I knew immediately that he was my son.”

In Korea, family, loyalty and seniority have typically been given priority over individual pursuit. In the 1950s and early 1960s, most people suffered from post-war poverty. Fathers would sell their cattle to send their sons to Seoul for an education. In a farming society, there was a sense of mutual obligation between group members.

But Korea has since evolved into an industrial society, and further, to a technology-oriented society.

South Korea has produced brands like Samsung, LG and Hyundai. Korean K-Pop and Psy’s Gangnam Style have made the world dance to Korean beats. Beauty brands are riding Korea’s pop culture wave, popularly known as hallyu.

Last month South Koreans watched with a mix of pride and regret a Korean-born short-track skater earning three gold medals under the Russian flag at the Sochi Winter Olympics.

In 2011, at the invitation of Russians, Viktor Ahn – Korean name Ahn Hyon-Soo – gave up his Korean nationality and chose to become a Russian. The decision came after his dream for the Vancouver Games was reportedly frustrated by an ‘internal feud’ of the South Korean skating federation.

What if something like this had happened ten years ago? A Korean star who abandoned his nationality for personal gain would hardly have had the sympathy of South Koreans. Now there is less hostility.

This mindset persists even today in fields like academics and science. Dr. Hwang Woo-Seok, a disgraced South Korean scientist, is one such example.

He was hailed as a national hero when he claimed to have developed the world’s first human embryonic stem cell, but fell from grace when he was found in 2005 to have fabricated scientific data. Hwang was fired from the prestigious Seoul National University. He was convicted for embezzlement and bioethical violations. He had hurt the nation’s reputation globally – something considered unforgivable.

Few South Koreans blame sports star Ahn. “We are willing to applaud Viktor Ahn’s personal triumph,” said Bang Hyeon-Chull, in an editorial in Chosunilbo newspaper. “Nobody can criticise him for his choice. To a person who has talent, nationality should no longer be a limit. Viktor Ahn gave us a task to build a new rule of the game where we are competing and assessed individually.”

Generational differences are also visible today. While senior Koreans cherish the importance of being together, things are becoming different for the younger generation that has come of age at a time of relative affluence and freedom.

The number of births each year has halved in the last three decades, with the figure touching 430,000 in 2013, according to the Korean Statistical Information Service (KOSIS). In 2050, 36-39 percent of South Koreans will be 65 or older, KOSIS said.

There is a massive corporate retiree population from among the seven million South Koreans born in the post-war period from 1954 to 1964. They make up 14.6 percent of the country’s population. The impact of this demographic shift is already showing – South Korea’s working population is falling by 1.2 percent annually.

The per capita gross national product (GNP) has jumped from 80 dollars in the 1960s to at least 20,000 dollars in 2013. But as the country transforms into a highly competitive society, many now suffer from depression now. The illness, which seldom showed up in an agrarian society, has today become one of the major causes of death in South Korea.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said in its 2010 survey that South Korea tops the world’s suicide rate: 33.5 in every 100,000 people commit suicide every year in the country.

President Barack Obama tried Monday to jumpstart a new national discussion on mental health, sponsoring a conference with Vice-President Joe Biden aimed at reducing social stigma around the issue.

The event took place five months after two-dozen schoolchildren were killed in a shooting spree in the state of Connecticut by a killer who allegedly suffered from psychological problems. Since then bipartisan supporters have urged greater government focus on overhauling the country’s creaky mental health infrastructure.“If someone had cancer in your family or diabetes, you wouldn’t be afraid to seek help or talk about it." -- Dennis Wharton of the National Association of Broadcasters

“For the first time in a really long history, we have a president who is actually doing something tangible on this issue,” Mike Fitzpatrick, executive director the National Alliance on Mental Health, an advocacy group, told IPS. “President Obama is actually moving into the community and bringing together groups that haven’t worked together before to develop new partnerships. It’s exciting.”

Fitzpatrick called the United States’ current system of care for young adults dealing with mental health issues “abysmal”.

According to President Obama, speaking Monday at the opening of the conference, one in five adults in the United States experiences some form of mental illness. In addition, some 22 veterans of war commit suicide each day.

“The main goal of this conference is not to start a conversation, so many of you have spent decades waging long and lonely battles to be heard,” the president stated. “Instead, it’s about elevating that conversation to a national level and bringing mental illness out of the shadows.”

President Obama announced the launch of the new website, mentalhealth.gov, a clearinghouse of information for those seeking mental health services. The site will also host stories of those who have overcome mental health-related problems.

“We also need a change of hearts and minds,” Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said at Monday’s conference. “We need to break down social barriers and help people understand that recovery is very real.”

Alongside the website, U.S. media outlets across the country are set to start a coordinated national campaign aimed at destigmatising mental health. According to organisers, the campaign will start by focusing simply on getting those suffering from mental health problems to feel comfortable talking about their experiences.

“If someone had cancer in your family or diabetes, you wouldn’t be afraid to seek help or talk about it,” Dennis Wharton, a communications executive for the National Association of Broadcasters, told IPS.

“So this new ad campaign will include television, radio and online advertisements targeted at 13- to 24-year-olds with the message that is it okay to talk about mental illness.”

Wharton says the new ads will not star celebrities, but instead feature a cross-section of U.S. society. “Because mental health knows no gender or race boundaries – this affects all walks of life,” he says.

Years of cost-cutting

Significant resources will be aimed at people who have served in the U.S. military.

For instance, Blue Star Families, an advocacy group for military families, will be producing a series of ads featuring country music stars urging veterans with mental health problems to seek help.

According to Barbara Van Dahlen, president of Give an Hour, a mental health advocacy group for veterans, says it’s unsurprising that many veterans suffer from mental illness, given their wartime experiences.

“It doesn’t mean that they are broken,” she said Monday. “It doesn’t mean that they can’t be great parents, great partners and great co-workers.”

Van Dahlen stresses the need for trauma and substance abuse to be included in the category of mental illnesses. Advocates emphasise that substance abuse is an indicator of deeper problems, often mental health issues – and that dealing with those problems often helps with the substance abuse, as well.

President Obama announced that in coming months more than 150 “summits”, similar to Monday’s conference, would take place across the country. Hosted by the Department of Veteran Affairs, these will be held between July and September.

“What we ultimately want to do is take the conversations we are having today in the White House, and take them to school auditoriums, community centres, houses of worship, living rooms and kitchen tables across this country,” Health Secretary Sebelius said.

Nonetheless, she also warned of the presence of significant barriers to the new initiative, particularly given years of cost-cutting and the current environment of financial austerity.

“States have cut back on mental health services, and there’s no question that there has been dramatic reduction in state funding,” she said. “We have been trying at the federal level not only to keep federal funding, but also to increase access to services.”

The president’s 2014 budget, for instance, has a request for the training of 5,000 new mental health providers, particularly those who can work with people to transition into university.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Health’s Fitzpatrick, the United States currently requires a massive effort to train practitioners and other medical professionals to be able to offer some form mental health care. Currently, he says, many who are actively seeking help simply cannot find it.

First, however, the new Obama administration push on this issue is focusing on trying to make people comfortable enough to discuss their experiences in the first place. In closing comments Monday, Vice-President Biden drew on personal experiences to urge others seek out mental health-related help if they need it.

“There is nothing, nothing to be ashamed of if you are struggling with mental issues or if your child is or your spouse or your friend,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay to ask for help.”

Renato Grbic is a simple Belgrade fisherman, who grew up on the shores of the Danube River in Belgrade, but he performs an additional job that he is not paid for.

In the last 14 years, 50-year-old Grbic has saved the lives of 25 people who were attempting to commit suicide by jumping into the river from Belgrade’s Pancevo Bridge.

“When I ask them why (they wanted to end their lives), they either say they were ‘depressed’ or they ‘could not take it any more’,” he told IPS. “Times are really hard for people today.”

Serbian Health Minister Slavica Djukic Dejanovic echoed Grbic’s words when she said, “By 2020, depression will be the second leading cause of absence from work.

“The current number of psychotherapists and psychiatrists is not enough to deal with the issue and we are making an effort to improve the situation soon,” she added in her opening address at a congress of mental health experts in Belgrade.

According to statistics from the ministry of health, this Eastern European nation of 7.2 million people has only 350 certified psychotherapists and 900 psychiatrists.

The Association of Psychotherapy Societies of Serbia puts the need for psychotherapists at between 6,000 and 8,000. Some 1,500 specialists are currently undergoing training and will be qualified to enter the system soon.

“Roughly a third of the population has experienced mental disorder due to the current economic crisis that has taken its toll in the form of unemployment and growing poverty,” Nadja Maric Bojovic, head of the Belgrade Psychiatry Clinic, told reporters.

Lingering trauma from the wars that ripped through the region in the 1990s, coupled with memories of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, as well as enduring hardships from economic stagnation during a period of international sanctions 1992-2000 have all compounded the issue.

“European statistics put the rate of mental disorders at 27 percent in 27 European Union member countries, with issues such as anxiety, insomnia and depression at the top of the list,” she added.

Concurring with largely accepted data by other experts in the field, she said that one in ten people with mental health issues has sought professional help.

“A large number of people have mental problems, but do not know how to solve them,” Zoran Milivojevic, head of the Association of Psychotherapy Societies of Serbia told IPS. In the absence of adequate professional services, “they take to tranquillisers instead, (leading to) large abuse of these substances.”

Ministry of health statistics suggest that the tranquilliser bromazepam (known in Serbia as ‘Bensedine’) was the most frequently prescribed drug in the country in 2011. Doctors prescribed 4.3 million packs of the product, with three million sold under the counter that same year, despite a prohibition law since 2002.

The tranquilliser lorazepam was the fifth most common prescription drug in 2011, with 1.6 million legally issued packs.

“They think it’s simply easier to take a drug than to try to solve problems with visits to therapists,” psychologist Nebojsa Jovanovic told IPS. “That calls for (increased) personal involvement.”

Serbian institutions have insufficient data on mental health issues, with the exception of precise statistics on suicides. There Serbia ranks 13th in the world, with 14 suicides per 100,000 people, according to statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Translated into annual statistics, this means that there were 1,400 suicides in Serbia in 2011, almost four per day.

But the only specialised centre for prevention of suicides – an emergency phone line in Belgrade  – ceased to exist in September due to a lack of finances.

“We had more than 2,300 calls from February 2011 until September this year,” Branka Kordic, the psychologist who was in charge of the project told IPS.

“We had no statistics on how many suicides we prevented, but most of the callers were men over 50 who had lost jobs, whom I’d call the biggest casualties of transition, who lost self-esteem, family support and the basic means of existence.”

Since 2000 Serbia has made a painful transition into the market economy, which accompanied by the last global crisis, led to a record unemployment rate of 25.5 percent.

The economic hardships and personal struggles have “been too long and too much for many,” Nebojsa Jovanovic told IPS.

The economic recession in Spain is taking a toll on mental health. Credit: Photostock/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Aug 29 2012 (IPS)

Rising rates of depression and suicide are among the most obvious signs of the increase in mental illness resulting from the economic crisis in Spain.

“Between December 2011 and March or April 2012, the number of suicides presumably linked to economic problems has increased significantly,” a forensic investigator in the southern Spanish city of Málaga, who asked to remain anonymous, told Tierramérica*.

During the first months of 2012, two well-known businessmen were found burned to death in their own cars in seaside towns in the province of Málaga, and all of the evidence seems to suggest that they took their own lives after their businesses went bankrupt, said the investigator, who did not offer any further details.

Suicide is already the leading cause of violent death in Spain, ahead of motor vehicle accidents. The number of suicides did not grow significantly between 2007, prior to the crisis, and 2010, the last year for which official statistics are available.

In 2007, deaths by suicide numbered 3,263, divided between 2,463 men and 800 women, according to a report on fatalities by cause of death released by the National Statistics Institute (INE). In the following years, slight fluctuations were observed: 3,457 in 2008, 3,429 in 2009 and 3,158 in 2010.

Statistics on suicide are not generally made public, and emergency services do not report them to the media, although deaths from other causes do receive news coverage.

“In 95 percent of cases, journalists do not go to the scenes of suicides, but they do show up at the scenes of homicides or accidents,” the forensic specialist reported.

Journalist Gema Martínez, who works for a local daily newspaper, told Tierramérica that suicides are generally not treated as “news” in order to avoid the potential for “copycats”.

“A great deal of care is taken when it comes to information on suicides and, in fact, when it is known that a death is the result of self-harm, this is not reported. It is almost as if it were part of an unwritten code of ethics,” she said.

But the scope of the health problem represented by an increase in suicides for social and economic reasons should be addressed by the media, said Martínez.

As psychiatrist Concha López told Tierramérica, suicide is generally the end result of a combination of factors. “The crisis and economic problems are one more reason that has been added, but not the only one,” she stressed.

Nevertheless, the crisis is undoubtedly becoming an increasingly powerful factor.

Unemployment currently affects 24.6 percent of the country’s economically active population, and there are 1.5 million households in which every member of the family is out of work, according to the INE. Spain has a population of over 47 million.

In addition, Spaniards have endured successive cuts in basic health care and education services, undertaken by the government to reduce the public deficit to 6.3 percent of GDP by the end of the year, so as to meet its commitment to the European Commission.

López said her psychiatric practice is receiving increasingly more men and women suffering from the symptoms of depression after losing their jobs, as well as others who are still employed but are facing a deterioration in work conditions and enduring considerable hardships to keep their jobs at any cost.

These patients suffer from “sadness, insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, feelings of guilt and suicidal thoughts,” reported López, who said there has been a sizeable increase in the number of unemployed people who are “seeking answers” in the offices of psychiatrists and psychologists.

“In Málaga, the hospital emergency wards admit two or three people who have attempted to kill themselves every day,” said López, who has worked for eight years at the Community Mental Health Unit in Fuengirola, a town in the province of Málaga.

More than 50 percent of young people in Spain are unemployed and, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one in every four children is poor.

The income gap between the rich and poor has grown more in Spain than in any other of the 27 countries of the European Union, according to the report “Exclusión y desarrollo social – Análisis y perspectivas 2012” (Exclusion and social development: Analysis and outlook 2012), published by the Catholic organisation Caritas in February. The report places the poverty rate in Spain at 21.8 percent.

Gaspar Llamazares, a medical doctor and deputy from the opposition Izquierda Unida (United Left) party, spoke in Congress in February about the “upsurge” in suicides and stated that “the only factor that can explain it is the crisis.” Those who take their own lives are “workers made desperate by the lack of social security coverage,” he added.

After visiting a number of pharmacies in Málaga, Tierramérica confirmed that the demand for anti-depressant medications is on the rise.

“Sales of anti-depressants have increased by around 10 percent,” said a pharmacy manager with more than a decade of experience in the field. “It has been very noticeable. More people are coming in with doctors’ prescriptions to purchase psychoactive drugs,” concurred a young pharmacist at another drugstore, where she has worked for a year and a half.

Spain is not alone in this epidemic of despair.

In Italy, the financial and economic crisis has contributed to higher rates of suicide and attempted suicide, according to the article “Excess Suicides and Attempted Suicides in Italy Attributable to the Great Recession”, published in August in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

The article reports on a grassroots protest movement of “widows of the crisis” in the northern Italian city of Bologna, the wives of businessmen, craftsmen and workers who have been driven to suicide by bankruptcy and overwhelming debts.

In Greece, where the suicide rate has always been low compared to the average in Europe, there has also been an upsurge in cases of people who have taken their own lives for reasons related to the crisis.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.