Shin (14), a middle school student in Daegu has been addicted to gaming for years. He stayed up all night in his room playing games. He was always late for school, and his friends teased him, calling a “game otaku(maniac)”. Shin blamed himself for being “someone unnecessary.” Late last year, he was diagnosed with severe depression and tried to be admitted to a psychiatric ward at a university hospital, but there were no vacancies, and he was only admitted this month.
“The 30 closed wards at Severance Hospital, which used to house adult schizophrenia patients, are now filled with teens and 20s,” Shin Yee-jin, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Severance Hospital, said on Jan. 29. “Most of them have become so depressed that they have attempted self-harm and suicide.”
The number of teens and 20s suffering from depression, self-harm and other mental illnesses is on the rise. According to the National Health Insurance Corporation, there were 13,303 psychiatric hospitalizations for teens and 20s in 2017, or 14.6% of all patients. But last year, the number rose to 16,819 (22.2%), an increase of nearly 10 percentage points in five years.
The rate of increase is also steep. According to the National Medical Center, 46%(19,972) of the 43,268 people who came to the emergency room for self-harm and suicide attempts between June 2021 and June 2022 were aged 10 to 29. While the overall number of self-harm and suicide attempts increased by 11.7% over the past five years, the number of teens and 20s who harmed themsleves jumped by 52.5% and 68.9%, respectively.
The most common reason for these attempts was “mental health problems” (44.1%). Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for parents to say, “My child is just going through puberty and there is nothing wrong with him(her),” due to prejudices against psychiatric treatment.
In recent years, the number of people with depression has been increasing the fastest among these age groups. Experts said, “The aggressive and impulsive tendencies caused by depression often lead to self-harm when expressed internally and crime when expressed externally.”
It’s not uncommon that the mentally vulnerable young generations share photos of self-injury on social media, which is called “self-harm displays”. Drug abuses among this certain age group are also frequently reported. It is said many teens and 20s take large amounts of a certain cold medicine that is rumored to have hallucinogenic effects and end up in the emergency room.