Mental Health Screening Every 2 Years Instead of 10, Creation of 'Saengmyeong Jonjung Village'... "30% Suicide Rate Reduction by 2027"

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‘Life Respect Safe Villages’ tailored to local community conditions such as new towns, rural areas, and apartment-dense regions will be established. The national free mental health screening interval will be shortened from 10 years to 2 years. The government aims to reduce the world’s highest suicide rate (26.0 per 100,000 population as of 2021) to 18.2 by 2027, a 30% decrease. On the 14th, the Ministry of Health and Welfare held the 6th Suicide Prevention Policy Committee chaired by Prime Minister Han Duck-soo and finalized the ‘5th Basic Suicide Prevention Plan’ (2023?2027) containing these details.

The biggest feature of this plan is that suicide prevention measures are prepared according to population characteristics and residential environments. Life Respect Safe Villages will be established in all 17 metropolitan cities and provinces nationwide. Representative examples include ‘Student Mental Health Villages,’ ‘Senior Mental Health Villages,’ and ‘Life Love Apartments.’ A similar model is Seoul Gangseo-gu’s ‘Life Love Safe Apartment.’ It is a project aimed at creating a ‘suicide-free safe apartment’ where all residents protect each other by promoting residents’ mental health to prevent depression and suicide. After Gayang 4 Complex Apartment was designated as the first in 2021, Banghwa 11 Complex Apartment was recently designated as the second.

Gwak Suk-young, Director of Mental Health Policy at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said, “Suicide prevention measures are applied differently depending on areas such as new towns with many adolescents, rural areas with a high elderly population, and apartment complexes,” adding, “Various new measures may emerge, like the pesticide storage boxes already implemented in rural areas.”

For areas with a rapid increase in suicides (at the eup, myeon, dong level), swift community-led prevention measures will be prepared. However, the current problem is that it takes one year to receive regional suicide death data from Statistics Korea. Lee Doo-ri, Director of the Suicide Prevention Policy Division at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said, “With the revision of the Suicide Prevention Act, we will receive criminal justice information on suicide deaths from the National Police Agency to monitor areas with a rapid increase in suicides,” and “We will also provide consulting so that local governments can establish tailored measures.”

Mental Health Screening, Free Once Every 10 Years Shortened to Every 2 Years

Since early detection of mental health risk signals such as depression is important, mental health screenings will be conducted every two years, the same as physical health checkups. Until now, people aged 20 to 70 could receive a free depression screening once every 10 years. The target diseases for screening will also expand beyond depression to include bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The government plans to first introduce this for young adults aged 20 to 34 as early as 2025 and then gradually expand to other age groups. Even when visiting non-psychiatric clinics such as internal medicine or otolaryngology in the neighborhood, if depressive symptoms are observed, doctors will be able to refer patients to psychiatric departments, and a pilot project reflecting this referral fee will be institutionalized. Currently, this pilot is being operated in Busan for two years starting from March last year.

Suicide risk factors will also be continuously reduced. Suicide-inducing information spreading online will be managed by a 24-hour monitoring center. Currently, volunteers only request deletion from website administrators. In the future, a system will be established that can proceed from ‘24-hour monitoring → reporting → emergency rescue → investigation request.’ New suicide methods such as sedatives and sleeping pills will be designated as suicide means, and criminal penalties will be imposed for selling or distributing them for such purposes. Regarding charcoal briquettes containing oxidizing ignition agents, support will be provided for developing products with reduced content. For sellers, campaigns will continue to encourage displaying products in less conspicuous places or asking buyers about their intended use.

Since the suicide risk for suicide attempters and suicide bereaved families is 20?30 times and 8?9 times higher than the general population respectively, support for them will also be strengthened. They will be linked to mental health welfare centers for counseling and treatment costs, and one-stop services for suicide bereaved families will expand from the current 9 metropolitan cities and provinces to all 17 nationwide. A government official stated, “Through this measure, we aim to shed the stigma of having the highest suicide rate among OECD countries by 2027.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.