This, by the way, is one of the reasons that the aggregate national suicide rate in Korea (and also in Japan) exceeds the aggregate national suicide rate in the United States. The elderly (persons born before the end of the Korean War, and especially before the end of World War II) in those countries kill themselves at a much higher rate than the same birth cohort in the United States. On the other hand, rates of YOUTH suicide in recent decades have been much more comparable among those countries, and once when I checked in the 1990s, looking up World Health Organisation statistics, the youth suicide rate in the United States was actually higher than that in Japan. So some of the international comparisons in suicide rates have to take a careful look at cohort effects (rates specific to a particular era of birth) to better tease out hypotheses for the causes of differing rates of suicide.

This is an old issue all over the world, including in east Asia, the issue of children growing up and taking care of themselves and their children rather than their elderly parents. A comment on Hacker News (as I recall) recently mentioned the 1953 Japanese movie Tokyo Story (東京物語), which I began watching on a DVD from the public library last night. Yes, even in 1953 in early postwar Japan, families had to adjust to children not necessarily being by the side of their parents as the parents grew old.