A string of articles appeared the other day in Korean media, timed with World Suicide Prevention Day on Wednesday, reporting that Korea ranked highest among OECD member states in terms of its suicide rate. Commentators expressed bitterness over the grim statistics.

the suicide rate in South Korea surged by 90.8 percent in the 1997-2007 period… More surprising is that suicide emerged as the fourth biggest cause of death in South Korea. It was eighth in 1997.

More shocking is the fact that, according to a recent study, nearly sixty percent of middle and high school students in Korea say they have contemplated suicide at one point in their lives.

And apparently 60 percent of all suicides worldwide occur in Asia. A CNN report not long ago highlighted suicide chat rooms popping up throughout Japan, many of which offer explicit directions on methods of suicide. The report also focused on a group of individuals running a prevention hotline, mostly from their cell phones. Don’t know whether anything similar exists here in Korea.

About 12 years ago I travelled through Kerala, in southern India. I stayed with a man, an artist, whose house was covered in oil paintings of ceiling fans. Inside and out, there were these images, black fans on multi-colored backgrounds. I later learned that hanging by ceiling fan was a common method of suicide in Kerala, one of the most prosperous states in India (at the time at least) and one with the highest suicide rate.

My host explained to me that a majority of those who committ suicide belong to the lower middle classes, people hoping to climb the social ladder with no means of paying down their substantial debts. Often, as I saw first hand there, entire families would ingest pesticide to escape the shame of their circumstances.

From Kerala I headed north to Mumbai, where I was put up by a local journalist, a Keralite himself, who asked me whether suicide was really such a bad thing. He had also seriously defended India’s caste system, and in both cases I assume he was resisting attempts to view the world through a purely Western lens.

12 years on and I continue to wrestle with his statements. Not that I agree, but I’d like to understand where he was coming from. I read once in a book called The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression about how there’s a significant portion of people out there who see suicide as a brave, even noble, act.

In Korea, and much of Asia, there’s this notion of face. That maybe it’s better to take one’s life than bring shame on oneself and one’s family. I was always a little skeptical of this notion of face, thinking it gets kind of blown out of proprotion as a way to essentialize Asian culture. I’ve known several families affected by suicide, Asian and Western, and they’ve all been devastated by it.

I wonder, with all the religious institutions here, why these aren’t being made more use of. If there’s a stigma attached to seeing a psychiatrist, couldn’t a local church or temple provide some sort of outreach to individuals contemplating suicide?

I do know the pressures in Korea are intense. The pressure to succeed, to live up to expectations, to not fail. And there aren’t the safety nets here that exist in the US or other developed economies. I’d imagine one can go into a sort of free fall when beginning that slide downwards.