Shin (14), a middle school student in Daegu has been addicted to gaming for years. He stayed up all night in his room playing games. He was always late for school, and his friends teased him, calling a “game otaku(maniac)”. Shin blamed himself for being “someone unnecessary.” Late last year, he was diagnosed with severe depression and tried to be admitted to a psychiatric ward at a university hospital, but there were no vacancies, and he was only admitted this month.
“The 30 closed wards at Severance Hospital, which used to house adult schizophrenia patients, are now filled with teens and 20s,” Shin Yee-jin, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Severance Hospital, said on Jan. 29. “Most of them have become so depressed that they have attempted self-harm and suicide.”
The number of teens and 20s suffering from depression, self-harm and other mental illnesses is on the rise. According to the National Health Insurance Corporation, there were 13,303 psychiatric hospitalizations for teens and 20s in 2017, or 14.6% of all patients. But last year, the number rose to 16,819 (22.2%), an increase of nearly 10 percentage points in five years.
What kind of shit is this?!? They should be studying!! /s
In all seriousness this was a bygone conclusion. Korean (honestly most Asian countries) society places WAY to much emphasis on education to an obsessive degree. Your middle school entrance exams shouldn’t dictate your entire life. For an 11 year old to experience that kind of pressure im surprised theres not cases of adolescent PTSD from scoring low on exams.
It’d be surprising if there wasn’t, but it was just underdiagnosed, considering that there have been cases of people being driven to their own deaths, because they didn’t score as high in the exam as they needed/wanted, and that the attitude towards mental health is a bit dated in areas.
That is absolutely ridiculous… Our brains don’t even finish developing until our mid 20s (some research suggests it can take an additional few years for those with ADHD).
My school performance (with ADHD) was so much different in middle and high school than thru undergrad and now graduate school.
It’s totally asinine to put that kind of pressure on kids, especially when standardized tests don’t even accurately evaluate learned material.
Yeah but we need these kids to be super computers that squeeze more productivity out of one singular person than ever before… Otherwise how are we gonna keep those profit margins?
Just jobs for the savants, everyone else is worthless. We all need to be robots for our overlords already and if you aren’t, have you tried taking drugs to get you closer to one?