Thursday, May 07, 2009

Suicide Rate

Found this text while browsing through Time Magazine today. It's pretty disturbing, but it also made me think.

"A lot of Asian people just work without any other things to make life more interesting; if they lose their jobs, it throws their life into total disarray," said Paul Yip, director of the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention in Hong Kong. "If the financial crisis is going to have an impact on suicide rates, it'll be more serious in Asia."

Rises in male suicide rates a year after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

South Korea: 45%
Hong Kong: 44%
Japan: 39%




Anybody has an opinion? I don't think I have enough general knowledge to make any statements on this quote, but I just think it's interesting what he said about Asians. At least this quote is totally valid when I try to think of what happened to my Dad after he resigned from work. He suddenly lost sense of his own value in life and his whole life went into "disarray". Glad to say that now Ken's existence has given back his sense of value in life.

I think one of the things that Indonesian needs is a place where the elderly can do plenty of activities together ('coz I know my Aunt who lives in Canada with her hubby can still do plenty of fun activities with other pensioners). Unfortunately I think if they do build (or have built) that kind of place in Indo, it's going to be SO costly that the elderly can't afford it. Back to ground zero then.

Oh well...just a little something to think about.


5 comments:

  1. it's happened to me as well. After I resign (after 10 years works) from my job to move here, I felt I am not valuable as human. But of course I don't plan to suicide hi hi hi hi... I just felt "empty".

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  2. In Asia, many older couples don't share an intimate relationship. Hence when they lose their jobs and return home to find lack of friendship and support in the home, they lose their sense of worth.

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  3. Wish you a nice weekend...

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  4. Jul: Yeah, I understand what you mean. :-)))) Now you're SO busy, so you can't feel empty anymore. GOOD for you he he...

    Blur Ting: You're SO right!!! I actually feel that in Asia, if you're still so lovey-dovey at such an old age, you're considered "out of the line" or something like that, which is actually such a shame. :-((((

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  5. when we lose jobs, we don't feel as good about ourselves. THat's a fact. The mistake is that we should not DEFINE ourselves by our work even if it's very important to us.
    Americans take work seriously too and I'm sure there have been some suicides b/c of the recession here (as well as elsewhere). It's basically a shame that lost money isn't the only casualty in a recession. IT's been well documented that when stockbrokers lost piles of money when the stock market crashed in 1929 and 1987, some men jumped out of NY skyscrapers.

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