PRESENT POINT POWER

(EDITORIAL from the

Korea

Times on Feb. 12)

Suicides by pop stars: Horrendous impact on young people

It is shocking that popular entertainers have committed suicide lately. Jeong Da-bin, a popular TV actress, was found dead Saturday morning. She hung herself in her boyfriend’s apartment in southern Seoul. People were particularly startled by her sudden death as it came less than a month after Yuni, another famous pop singer, killed herself in a similar way. A worrisome fact is that her suicide may prompt other youngsters who adore her to follow suit.

Though the exact cause of her suicide is not yet known, unbearable stress is presumed to be responsible for pushing her to kill herself. Her death reminds people of movie actress Lee Eun-joo who committed suicide in 2005.

February 23, 2005 - 4:24PM;

Korean actress Lee Eun-ju, 25, who starred in one of the highest-grossing movies in South Korea's history, has died, leaving a suicide note scrawled in blood. She had apparently hanged herself with a necktie in a dressing room yesterday.

ABOVE: Korean actress Lee Eun-ju, 25, killed herslef on 22nd Feb 2005

Lee starred in the hit movie Taeguki, and had been battling depression, her family told Korean media. She left a suicide note scrawled in blood, in which she wrote "Mom, I am sorry and I love you," police said. She suffered a bout of mental illness after performing nude scenes for her role as a sultry jazz singer in the noir Korean crime movie The Scarlet Letter, her family said. The movie was selected as the closing film last year at one of the biggest film events in Asia, the Pusan International Film Festival. Lee's managers said the movie had nothing to do with her suicide.
Lee is best known for her role in Taeguki, which can be translated as "National Flag". The movie, about brothers who are forced to fight in the Korean War, set an opening-day box office record in Korea and made the rounds of the international circuit. Lee was considered a rising star in the South Korean movie industry, one of the hottest in Asia. She scored her first major role in the 2000 movie Oh! Soo-jung and had graduated from Danguk University a few days before she was found dead.

To become a popular entertainer here is to follow a thorny path. Only a gifted few can reach stardom. What is more difficult is remaining on the crest of popularity.

No matter how popular one may be, stars who slip from center stage for about a year, slip out of people’s memory. Jeong, 27, was active as a TV actress until a few years ago. Her pure and innocent image in TV dramas and movies was the talk of the town. For youngsters yet to mature, becoming an idol performer guaranteeing money and fame would be something hard to handle. However, even more difficult is the ability to cope with the sense of frustration they taste at the time of falling from stardom.

Suicides by famous entertainers or politicians can have a tremendous impact on the behavior of ordinary people. We have witnessed many cases of imitating suicide in and out of this country. Particularly, those suffering depression or in an unstable condition are liable to be prompted to kill themselves, according to psychiatrists.

However, their personal frustration is not all that leads them to suicide. Rampant verbal attacks on certain entertainers through Web sites are pointed out to be a major factor. Case in point is pop singer Yuni, who killed herself last month. She was said to have been very upset by people’s abusive remarks on the Web. Some people went so far as to tell her “what a letdown to know that your good looks came from plastic surgery.”

(END)
= = = == = UPDATE: Feb 11 2007

Insiders Suspect Foul Play in Actress' Suicide; from English.chosan.com

The actress Jeong Da-bin was found dead at a villa in Seoul’s affluent Gangnam district on Saturday. Jeong was found hanged with a towel in the bathroom at the home of a person only identified as Lee. Lee, Jeong’s boyfriend and the first to call the police, testified that Jeong came to his house very drunk in the early hours of Saturday morning and that he found her dead when he woke up around 7:50 a.m. According to police, Jeong had been drinking with two friends at a bar in Cheongdam-dong and called Lee to come and pick her up since she was too drunk to go home. Lee joined Jeong for a drink and they arrived at his house in Samseong-dong at around 3:20 a.m. Lee told police that Jeong had recently been depressed over her lack of work and the imprisonment of her previous manager.

Police estimated Jeong died between 7:30 to 7:50 a.m., and though no note was found, police assume it was suicide since there were no immediate signs of foul play. The actress Jeong Da-bin, who was found dead at a villa in Samseong-dong, Seoul on Saturday. Jeong, whose real name was Jeong Hae-sun, posted a note on her personal blog around 5:04 a.m. on Friday expressing a complicated state of mind. “I am complicated, and I feel like I am going to die. I am angry without reason, and I might go mad…I feel like I have lost myself and my identity…The Lord came to me…I was about to collapse, and he quietly lifts me up.”

The exact cause of death will be revealed by the postmortem. A woman identified as Jang, who had been drinking with Jeong, said the actress was carefully choosing her next work and was eager to perform. “I can’t believe that she killed herself. Jeong invited us to her house the day after tomorrow, and she showed great determination about her acting career,” police quoted Jang as saying. Jeong’s family opposed an autopsy at first but changed their minds after a gathering Sunday to discover whether it was really suicide. A memorial for the actress Jeong Da-bin is being set up at the Asan Medical Center in Seoul on Saturday.

ABOVE : Jeong's during her prime time. Her pure and innocent image in TV dramas and movies was the talk of the town then. What is more difficult is remaining on the crest of popularity.

Jeong’s new management agency claims there were some suggestions of foul play. It said a scar on Jeong’s wrist was not from a suicide attempt in October 2006, as Lee had suggested, but a scar she received in her first year in high school. It also said the actress showed strong determination to work when she talked about her future plans with close friends she contacted right before her death. The agency says the last posting on her website cannot be read as a suicide note.

A member of Jeong’s family said, “We can’t figure out why she wanted to commit suicide, and we decided to request the postmortem because we want to know for sure what happened.”

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ABOVE : A more recent picture Korean actress Jeong Da-bin; past her prime time and find it more and more difficult to get roles in movies. The young fresh faces are all lined up. So when to know to retire gracefully instead of taking one's life to solve a problem?

Korean actress Jeong Da-bin was found dead at her boyfriend's home on Saturday 10th Feb 2007, according to police. Investigators said Jeong, 27, apparently hanged herself at her boyfriend's house in southern Seoul at around 8 a.m. The boyfriend, who was only identified by his last name Lee, told the police that he discovered the body. He was quoted as saying that she was found dead with a white towel around her neck. The police suspect that Jeong committed suicide considering there was no sign that it was a murder.

They are trying to determine the exact cause of her death. Jeong, who also became a Korean pop culture star in Taiwan in 2005, acted in television dramas and movies. If her death is confirmed to have been a suicide, it would be the latest case of a well-known Korean actress or pop star taking her own life. On Jan. 21, a female singer Yuni committed suicide, while movie actress Lee Eun-joo killed herself in February 2005, which shocked many Koreans.

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Suicide surges in South Korea, fuelled by economic development, online boom

Provided by: Canadian Press; Written by: BURT HERMAN; Feb. 11, 2007
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Dr. Lee Hong-shick saw signs of trouble while visiting a hospital emergency room as a psychiatrist: more and more people with wrists slashed or stomachs full of drugs in suicide attempts, but treated and sent home without further attention. So Lee founded the Korean Association for Suicide Prevention several years ago and has become one of the growing number of voices calling attention to a surge in suicides that has vaulted South Korea among the world's top countries for such deaths.

"Someone who slits their wrists, they just get stitched up. (But) the main problem is why they decide to attempt suicide," Lee said at his hospital office at Seoul's Yonsei University. "This should not be seen as an individual's problem, but society should help these people." The rate of suicides in South Korea soared to 24.7 per 100,000 people in 2005, according to the latest statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that rank the country at the top of the list.

Others with high rates were Hungary at 22.6 and Japan at 20.3, both using numbers from 2003, the latest available. By comparison, the U.S. suicide rate was 10.2 per 100,000 in 2002, the OECD said. The National Police Agency recorded 14,011 suicides by South Koreans in 2005. Suicide is the leading cause of death for South Koreans in their 20s and 30s, and the No. 4 cause overall, the chief statistics agency said in a September report.

The suicide trend has been fuelled by South Korea's status as one of the world's most wired countries with a highly developed Internet infrastructure, meaning finding methods to kill oneself or partners for group suicides are just a few mouse clicks away. Although there are different motivations for suicide, the common denominator is "stress and pressure," Lee said, pointing to an unfortunate side-effect of the country's rapid economic development.

"Rapid change is the biggest problem in all areas - the economy and family system," he said. "At the same time the support system is getting weaker."

South Korea is regularly hailed as a success story that has built a robust high-tech economy from the ashes of the Korean War. But growth has also brought increased pressures. Families spend heavily to get children ahead with endless private after-school lessons, competition for jobs is fierce and housing prices have soared, weighing on youths and young adults. Suicides also are rising among people in their 60s who don't want to burden to their families. Dr. Ahn Myoung-ock, a parliament member, has sponsored a series of bills calling for a co-ordinated government approach to suicide.

The proposals range from beefing up prevention and counselling to allowing confidential use of satellite positioning data from cellphones to locate people trying to kill themselves. "I hope since we have had that kind of compressed rapidity of economic development ... that we have the ability to solve this rapidly as well," she said. Even the rich and famous are part of the trend. The latest high-profile casualty came in January, when pop singer Yuni was found hanged in her apartment in the city of Incheon. Relatives said she was gripped by depression from the pressure associated with the release of her third album.

= = = = =See previous posting , Go H E R E On