Why South Korea’s Youth Suicide Rate Stays High: A Parent’s Look At Unspoken Social Pressures
It was 10:15 on a Wednesday night last January when my 17-year-old niece Soo-ah slid into the booth across from me at the coffee shop near her high school in Seoul. Her backpack, slung over one shoulder, had a bent NewJeans keychain and was crammed full of crumpled mock test papers. She ordered an iced vanilla latte with extra boba, dropped the backpack on the floor, and pulled out a math exam folded in half. She’d gotten second place in her grade. Her mom had already texted three times asking for the rank.
“Second isn’t good enough, right?” she said, staring at the table. “If I can’t get first now, I’ll never get into Seoul National. Then what am I supposed to do?”
I ordered a plate of tteokbokki for her, and we sat there while all the other kids from her school trundled past the window, pulling wheeled hagwon cram school bags, heading home from their 4-hour evening classes. Just six months before that, a 19-year-old boy from Soo-ah’s school had jumped off the roof of the school building after getting his college entrance exam results. The school sent a mass text to parents asking them to tell their kids not to discuss it, just to focus on upcoming midterms. No one talked about why it happened, not out loud. But every kid in the school knew: he’d missed the cut for his top choice university by three points, and his father had told him he was a disgrace who’d wasted 12 years of the family’s money.
That’s when I started connecting the dots I’d always felt but never put into words. South Korea’s suicide rate has been the highest in the OECD for over a decade, and people often talk about it as a problem of individual mental health, or social media pressure, or even stigma around getting help. But I don’t think that’s the core of it. The core is an irrational social structure that traps people into believing there’s only one acceptable path to a life worth living – and if you step off that path at any point, you’re worthless.
It’s not just teens, either. Middle-aged men have one of the highest suicide rates here: companies force workers out in their 50s to cut costs, and there’s almost no chance of getting another full-time job that pays enough to cover your kid’s hagwon fees and your mortgage. You go from being a “company man” who supports his family to a part-time delivery driver or convenience store clerk overnight, and the whole society treats you like you’ve failed. There’s no meaningful safety net, no alternative path that’s seen as good enough. If you don’t get into a top university by 19, get a chaebol job by 25, marry and buy an apartment by 35, you’re not just behind – you’re a failure, full stop.
When I talked to Soo-ah’s mom, my sister Min-jung, about this a few days after that coffee shop night, she admitted she’d bought into that structure completely for years. She was pushing Soo-ah harder every month, adding more hagwon classes, yelling about ranks, until that boy from the school died. She came home that day and looked at Soo-ah, who was 16 at the time, and realized she’d rather have her kid alive and working a retail job than dead and a top university graduate. She started making small changes, and those are the things I tell other parents here about when they ask what they can do, when the whole system feels impossible to change.
First, she stopped asking “what was your rank?” or “how did you do on the test?” when Soo-ah gets home from school. The first question she asks now is always “what was the silliest thing that happened today?” It’s such a small shift, but it changes the whole vibe of the evening right away. Second, she set a hard rule: no hagwon classes after 9pm, no exceptions. Even when all the other moms in her parent chat group said their kids were staying until 11pm to prep for the next exam, she held the line. Soo-ah is home in bed by 10:30 every night, instead of dragging in at midnight. Third, she cut one unnecessary advanced math hagwon that Soo-ah hated, and used the $400 a month it cost to pay for a weekly pottery class. It doesn’t count for college applications, it doesn’t help with her exam ranks, but it’s the one thing Soo-ah says she looks forward to all week. Fourth, Min-jung started talking about her own failures out loud, instead of hiding them. She tells Soo-ah about how she failed her first job interview three times, how she didn’t get the promotion she worked two years to get five years ago, and how that didn’t break her. It normalizes messing up, instead of making it feel like the end of the world.
These aren’t big fixes for the whole broken structure. I know that. The government still doesn’t do enough to expand the social safety net, large corporations still only hire from the top three universities, housing prices keep going up so fast that even two professional salaries can barely afford a small apartment in Seoul. The suicide rate still stays high, and every few months another kid from a local school makes the news.
Last month, Soo-ah got a B on her final chemistry midterm, a grade that would have had her hiding in her room crying a year ago. She came home and told her mom, bracing for a fight. Min-jung just ordered Soo-ah’s favorite pepperoni pizza, they turned on a silly dating reality show, and didn’t talk about the test all night. A week later, Soo-ah told me that for the first time, she didn’t think her life was over just because she got one bad grade.
I don’t know what will happen to Soo-ah when she takes her college entrance exam next year. I don’t know if the social structure here will ever change fast enough. But these small, daily choices add up for one kid. They don’t solve everything, but they’re something.
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