Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14 in Japan

Re:Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10... by DoreenMichele on Saturday March 23, 2019 @03:09AM (#19469403)

From what I have read, suicide is an issue for high school students in Japan due to extreme performance pressure.

As I understand it, they have 220 school days per year versus 180 in the US and they are expected to join study groups and the like "voluntarily," which de facto eats up a lot of their remaining free time.

I think the most charitable read it can be given is that a densely populated island nation has innate performance pressure. If you don't creatively squeeze every drop from the local resources, you face a population collapse. The high pressure culture is a attempt to mitigate those things.

I do get your point and I didn't downvote you. But I think you are probably missing this piece of the puzzle.

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Re:Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10... by rurban on Saturday March 23, 2019 @03:59AM (#19469512)

But this doesn't explain it all. China and Korea has the same extreme amount of school pressure on its children, but their suicide rates don't match up. Bullying and racism is also blatant in Korea, also overlong work hours. It must be correlated more to the stricter society rules there. It's also a much older society than the other two.

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Re:Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10... by PurpleRamen on Saturday March 23, 2019 @04:58AM (#19469668)

South korea has a high suicide-rate. It's the 10th highest in the world, 20 places above japan. According to wikipedia[0] suicide among children seems to be even higher than in japan. Though im not sure whether both compare the same context of numbers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea#/media/...

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Re:Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10... by SpikeDad on Saturday March 23, 2019 @02:15PM (#19471598)

Doubt you'd get real data on suicides from China. Everything is perfect there.

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Re:Suicide now leading cause of death among children aged 10... by DoreenMichele on Saturday March 23, 2019 @08:23AM (#19470142)

I wasn't pretending to explain it all. I was merely saying that it isn't as simple as "It's all good news -- it's a leading cause of death because it's a utopian ideal where everything else has been largely solved."

I know very little about it and I'm aware of this element of pressure contributing to the high suicide rate for teens. So it's no doubt more complicated.

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