On the 24th, a counseling room was set up at the Gokseong Police Station. It was the day the Gokseong County Mental Health Welfare Center opened a one-day "mobile counseling room" for police officers. Screening tests for depression and suicide risk were given, and an Omnifit device measured brain health, stress levels, concentration and autonomic nervous balance, with individual result sheets handed over. On the same day in Hwaseong Special City, a kickoff briefing for the "community mental health policy research" contract was held in a lecture room of the citizens' university.
On the same day, mental health programs were under way in several local governments.
In late July alone, more than six local governments were each running their own mental health programs. Eumseong County held a family culture experience for children and adolescents, and Gimpo City signed a respect-for-life agreement with its community social security council. Goseong County has a "4060 Mind Companion Program" aimed at middle-aged and older residents. The names and the target groups differ, and there is no ready way to put budgets and participant numbers on the same basis for comparison.
But the state of mind that people report has moved the other way. In the 2024 Survey on Public Knowledge and Attitudes toward Mental Health, in which the National Center for Mental Health asked 3,000 people aged 15-69, 73.6% said they had experienced a mental health problem in the past year. In 2022 it was 63.9%.
That is a rise of 9.7 percentage points in two years. Severe stress was reported by 46.3%, depressed feelings lasting several days by 40.2% and addiction-related experience by 18.4%, and all of these items rose by more than 10 percentage points from two years earlier.
In the same survey, 90.5% answered that "anyone can develop a mental illness." Prejudice has thinned that much. On the other hand, only 24.9% said they "know how to use mental health services."
That is down 3.0 percentage points from 27.9% in 2022. Over the period when programs increased, the share of people who know how to use them fell.
Where people turn when they ask for help is also outside the system. Family and relatives came to 49.4%, friends and neighbors to 41.0%. Where people without those resources go, the survey does not answer.
In international comparison as well, Korea is in the bottom group. In the Mind Health Report, in which the insurer AXA and the research firm Ipsos asked about 19,000 adults in 18 major countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas, Korea's mental health score was 58.5, 17th out of the 18 countries. Japan came last with 58.1, and the United Kingdom was 16th with 59.5.
The highest was Thailand at 66.5, followed by Switzerland at 65.4. The scoring criteria of this survey and the date it was conducted cannot be confirmed within the published reports.
In the United Kingdom, 60% of those who said they were experiencing a mental health problem had not received professional counseling in the past year. Another 25% worried about how people around them would view it if it became known that they were in counseling. Half of the respondents said a rapidly changing world affects their own happiness. There was a distance between admitting that one is unwell and actually receiving counseling.
Hwaseong Special City commissioned research to narrow that distance from the administrative side. The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs has taken it on and is running it for five months from July to November. The goal is to analyze mental health policy and an operating system suited to a population of 1.07 million, in line with the launch of the special city and the reorganization into four general districts, and to produce an organizational diagnosis and a restructuring plan. It is an approach that tries to redesign the system from the side of the people receiving it, rather than creating one more individual program.
Nonsan City chose to measure effects. Since May it has been running an "adolescent psychological support program" at nine elementary, middle and high schools in the city, with 140 sessions in total through the end of November and 49 students taking part. While the students go through activities such as play therapy, horticultural therapy and aromatherapy, the PHQ-9 depression scale and the SDQ-Kr strengths and difficulties questionnaire are each measured before and after participation.
For seven first graders at Naedong Elementary School, an in-depth assessment of the emotional and behavioral characteristics test is conducted face to face three times, a first-round questionnaire, a second-round in-depth counseling and a third-round results counseling. If a high-risk case is identified, it is passed on to a mental health medical institution and to the treatment support program for children and adolescents with mental illness living at home.
Forty-nine is a small number. Even so, this program records in figures how the participating children have changed, and it has designated where to send them next when risk appears. There have to be tools that measure and a passage leading to the next step for the work of caring for the mind not to rest on individual will alone.
The results of Hwaseong Special City's research come out in November. Nonsan City's before-and-after assessment will also be compiled once the program ends at the end of November. When this autumn passes, at least two places will have the material to say "how things changed" beyond "we did it."
