The 10th of last month was World Suicide Prevention Day. We need to focus on the day’s meaning because South Korea has had the highest suicide rate amongst all OECD countries for the last 13 consecutive years. Last year, 14,427 people in South Korea committed suicide, which averaged out at about 40 people dying per day. This is why South Korea is often called the Republic of Suicide.

Many steps have been taken in order to prevent suicide. One of these steps is the Love Bridge at Mapo Bridge. Warm words with messages such as “How are you doing?” have been written along the walls of the bridge in the hopes that people who are considering suicide will feel the warmth of the messages and prevent them from taking their own lives. In addition, the bridge lights turn on to illuminate people who walk on the bridge at night to allow distant people to see if anyone is trying to commit suicide. Through these measures, 179 of the 184 people who tried to commit suicide on Mapo Bridge were rescued in 2014.

Regarding other prevention measures on the bridge, the Seoul government accepted a citizen’s recommendation and is going to add an extra one meter to the 1.5 meter walls as well as rollers by this December to keep people from climbing up the walls to commit suicide.

However, this new measure has aroused many heated discussions on the Internet. In a news article about this new measure, a netizen (member of the online society) claimed that, “This will make people who try to commit suicide go to another place instead of Mapo Bridge,” and another netizen said, “No matter what measure is taken to prevent suicide, people who want to commit suicide will commit suicide no matter what. This is going to be useless.”

These criticisms could be true. To prevent suicide, it is more important to try to solve the social problems causing it such as education fever, the job crunch and the high costs of housing, rather than higher walls. However, we should not just accuse the government of not taking these problems into consideration. What we have to understand is that this new measure is a baby step. To make this new measure a true step in solving the suicide problem, the government needs to make more efforts in resolving social problems as netizens have claimed.

Editorial Consultant