블루터치

SEOUL: From their nondescript sixth-floor office, Kim Hee Joo and five other social workers troll the Internet to combat a disturbing trend in South Korea: people using the Web to trade tips about suicide, and in some cases to form suicide pacts.

"There are so many of them," said Kim, secretary general of the Korea Association for Suicide Prevention, a private group that is dedicated to counseling suicidal people, whose number is rising sharply here.

On April 7, the bodies of two women were found in a one-room apartment south of Seoul. They had sealed the room with plastic tape and then heated charcoal on a stove. They died from carbon monoxide poisoning when the room filled with the charcoal"s fumes. The two had met on the Internet.

On March 14, five young men and women who had twice attempted suicide as a group drove to a seaside motel to discuss more effective methods. One, having a change of heart, slipped out and called the police, who said later that the five had made their suicide pact over the Internet.

In the past 25 years, South Korea has gone from having one of the world"s lower suicide rates to having one of its highest. Although still surpassed by some countries that made up the former Soviet Union, South Korea"s suicide rate ranks among the highest in the 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In April, Japan announced measures to try to reduce its suicides from a rate of 24.2 in 2005. The rate for the United States in 2002 was 10.2.

The increase in suicides in South Korea has been especially steep in recent years, almost doubling from 6,440 in 2000 to 12,047 in 2005, according to the National Statistical Office.

Experts attribute the increase to the stresses of rapid modernization, but they are also raising alarms about the role of the Internet. South Korea also has one of the world"s highest rates of broadband access and the Internet has become a lethally efficient means of bringing together people with suicide on their minds.

"What worries me is that this trend of rising suicide rates will probably continue in South Korea," said Kang E Michael Hong, a professor of psychiatry at Seoul National University.

In hardly more than a generation, South Korea has transformed itself from an agrarian society to an extremely competitive high-tech economy, where the pressure to succeed at school and work is intense.

Meanwhile, the traditional support base, the family, is crumbling; divorce rates are at a record high. Guarantees of lifetime employment evaporated with the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s.

In 2005, in the first rally of its kind, hundreds of high school students demonstrated in downtown Seoul, shouting: "We aren"t study machines!"

They had gathered to mourn 15 students from around the country who had killed themselves, apparently broken by the intense pressure to succeed.

The government does not compile figures on how many suicides may have been inspired or aided by the Internet. But in an analysis of 191 group suicides reported in the news media from June 1998 to May 2006, Kim Jung Jin, a sociologist at Korea Nazarene University, found that nearly a third of the cases involved people who had formed suicide pacts through Internet chat sites.

A parallel trend is apparent in Japan, where 91 people killed themselves in 34 Internet-linked suicide pacts in 2005, almost triple the number of 2003, according to the police.

Since 2005, Web portals in South Korea, acting under pressure from civic groups, have banned words like "suicide" and "death" from the names of blogs. If a user keys in "suicide," search engines display links to counseling centers at the top of their search results.

"I really want to kill myself," said a Yahoo! Korea Web posting in April by an anonymous teenager who complained of bullying at school and his parents" pressure on him to improve his grades. "I only have 30,000 won. Can anyone sell me a suicide drug? I don"t want a painful death like jumping from a high place."

Such notes are not difficult to find on the bulletin boards of major Web portals here. In March, a 28-year-old man who ran a suicide-related blog called "Trip to Heaven," was arrested after he sold potassium cyanide to a 15-year-old boy he had met via the Internet. The boy used the poison to kill himself.

Meanwhile, the government is taking measures to impede suicide. Since nearly 40 percent of South Koreans who kill themselves do so by drinking pesticides or jumping, the government is considering making pesticides less toxic and is installing more barriers on rooftops and bridges.

Seoul Metro began erecting glass walls on subway platforms after 95 people, some wearing black plastic bags over their heads, threw themselves in front of subway trains in 2003. The government also plans to introduce a video surveillance system with monitors installed in the trains that will allow conductors to check platform conditions before the train enters a station.

"Your life is more precious to your family than anything else," says a public-service announcement on video screens in subway cars. It shows a middle-aged man, in despair over financial woes, stepping to the edge of a platform as the train roars in.

In 2005, the Korea Internet Safety Commission, a government watchdog on cyberspace, ordered the shutdown of 566 blogs, chat groups or Web postings that encouraged suicide, up sharply from 93 cases a year earlier. The figure declined to 147 in 2006 and rose again to 161 in the first four months of this year.

Kim"s suicide prevention team discovers an average of 100 suicide-related Web sites each month and asks portals to delete them. A few are serious enough to alert the police to possible violations of laws against assisting suicide or trading in hazardous substances.

"People used to use blog names like "Let"s Die Together," " said Kim. "Now they"re more careful. Once they"ve met each other, they shut down the site and switch to e-mail and cellphones. You need a lot of searching and hunches and luck to track down these people."

Recently Kim"s team discovered a blog called "Life Is Tough," described by its creator as a meeting place for people contemplating suicide. The site attracted several people who left their cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses to link up with others who wanted to "take the trip together."

The police are now searching for the person behind the blog to face possible charges of aiding suicide, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

"People are social animals," said Jason Lee, director of the Metropolitan Mental Health Center in Seoul. "Some apparently want a companion even when committing suicide."

An average of 600 people a month call the center or visit its 24-hour Internet counseling site, about 15 percent of them deemed at high risk of committing suicide. That number jumped following the recent suicides of three well-known female entertainers, including Jeong Da Bin, a 27-year-old actress, on Feb. 10.

The day before her death, Jeong left a message on her Web site that suicide experts said should have been a warning.

Under the title "The End," she wrote: "For no reason at all, I am going crazy with anger. Then, as if lightening had struck, all becomes quiet. Then the Lord comes to me. The Lord says I will be O.K. YES, I WILL BE O.K."