South Korea has ambitious suicide prevention goals, but officials tell TIME that data restrictions and funding constraints make the plan unattainable.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider. For international resources,
“The city said it would be better to ignore your request,” the official told TIME. The Incheon Metropolitan City government did not reply to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health and Welfare declined to respond to questions related to data sharing. “Our budget is really small. We are short-staffed. Our infrastructure is insufficient,” Yoon said. The central government’s blockade on suicide-related data doesn’t help, she added.
For example, imagine a city conducts 40 psychological autopsies in a month, and 30 of them find the deceased was consuming a large amount of alcohol in the weeks preceding their death. In response, a suicide prevention center could create alcohol-specific awareness-raising initiatives and partner with alcohol-related advocacy groups, tailoring their outreach to those the data identifies as high-risk groups.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare has the data, but they do not share the data with suicide prevention centers.”Baek Min-jeong, executive manager of social work at the Suwon Center for Suicide Prevention, tells TIME her center needs access to Statistics Korea’s city- and district-specific trends—or “macrodata”—as well as “individual data,” including from the Health Ministry’s psychological autopsies. “Our access is extremely limited,” she said.
Paik said the Japanese Health Ministry once withheld timely suicide-related data from local governments. “It was quite similar to South Korea,” he said. The Japanese government had “their own set of excuses” to justify the blockade, but they feared that sharing localized data could impede on individual rights to privacy—particularly in rural areas—and harm specific cities’ reputations, causing a collapse in housing prices.
Ha Sung-hun, the director of LifeLine Korea, a nonprofit crisis hotline, echoed Baek’s points, calling for a “whole-of-society” approach to suicide prevention policy. A Health Ministry spokesperson told TIME, without substantiation, that the researcher’s claims “lack evidence” and “differ from the truth.”
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