A recent rash of suicides in South Korea is being blamed on the grim economic climate, news reports said this week.
Medical experts say mental illness has also been on the rise here amid the recent stock market meltdown.
Yonhap news agency said a 47-year-old man in the southwestern city of Gwangju committed suicide last Sunday after suffering heavy losses in his highly leveraged investment in stocks.
The man put a total of 370 million won (US$255,000) in stocks two years earlier after taking out a mortgage on his house and using his life insurance as collateral, Yonhap said.
But he lost two-thirds of the investment in this year’s stock market plunge.
On the same day, a couple in their 60s were prevented from committing suicide by police, the Korea Times said. They had borrowed 100 million won from a security company last October, invested it all and lost most of it.
Acting on a tip from their relatives, police found the man writing a suicide note in his car, parked on a deserted road, with a wire around his neck. His wife was rescued after she swallowed sleeping pills at home.
On Oct. 9, a 32-year-old employee from a security firm was found dead at an inn in Seoul, also in an apparent suicide linked to the plummeting stock market, the Korea Times said.
“About 20 percent of my patients complain of growing agony over the market crash. They’ve got an extra reason to get depressed,” Ha Jee-hyun, a psychiatrist at Konkuk University Hospital said.
“Those who suffer from depression tend to blame themselves for everything that went wrong. They torture themselves over the market crash, even though the crisis is a global one,” he said.
The WHO warned last week that the global economic crisis is likely to cause an increase in suicides and mental illness as people struggle to cope with losing their homes or livelihoods.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique