Two heads of institutions signed an agreement at the Seoul Welfare Foundation building. They were Bae So-young, director of the Public Interest Law Center for Social Welfare, and Lee Ki-yeon, director of the Seoul Mental Health Welfare Center. The two bodies agreed to form a law-mental health committee (tentative name) and to jointly carry out education, cooperative projects and advisory work in specialized fields. The aim is to create a place people working in mental health welfare services can turn to when they run into legal problems.
It was the same week. On the 28th, the "strengthened emergency response measures on suicide," prepared by the Ministry of Health and Welfare together with related ministries, went before the Cabinet meeting. The measures were drawn up as a follow-up to the nine sets of field-specific measures handled at the 20th Cabinet meeting on May 6.
Beds for intensive treatment of patients in the acute phase of mental illness stand at 391, and the government said it would raise the number to 2,000 by 2030. Psychiatric emergencies will be treated as part of essential medical care. Regional psychiatric emergency medical centers, where emergency medicine and psychiatry departments see patients together, will increase from the current 13 to 17.
Police and fire services were dispatched to the scenes of suicide attempts 51,000 times last year. Of those, cases in which suicide prevention specialists went along came to only about 7 percent. That means there were people who went home without receiving a single counseling session after emergency room or on-site measures were completed. The government decided to add a new temporary protection service in which people can stay briefly before going home, receive counseling and protection, and be connected to case management.
Life-Love Crisis Response Centers, which handle risk assessment and short-term case management inside medical institutions, will go from 100 to 103 in 2027. Center directors will be given the authority to recommend emergency welfare support. Suicide attempt survivors and bereaved families who have returned to daily life will receive top priority for counseling with local specialists under the psychological counseling voucher program. The one-stop support program for bereaved families, which bundles treatment costs, housing costs, tuition and legal counseling, has been running nationwide since July this year.
There was movement in the National Assembly as well. Independent Rep. Choi Hyuk-jin introduced a partial amendment to the Higher Education Act on the 29th as its lead sponsor. It would have university heads draw up and carry out a student mental health support plan each year and allow them to place counseling and mental health specialists. It also requires them to put in place a system linking with specialized counseling institutions and medical institutions, and includes grounds for the state to provide administrative and financial backing.
The share of young people who have not found a job for more than a year after graduating stands at 48.6 percent as of May this year. It is the highest since the global financial crisis. The number of young people who are neither job hunting nor working and who answered that they "rested" has been rising for three years.
Separate responses are also under way in regions and schools. The Seoul Wee Network has opened metaverse counseling using avatars, letting people choose a counseling type and apply without showing their faces. It also runs non-face-to-face and face-to-face channels including 24-hour mobile counseling. Siheung City said it will build a cooperative system for the mental health of residents going through economic hardship, and the Guri Mental Health Welfare Center signed a three-party agreement to promote peer support for people with mental disabilities.
Increasing beds and creating a new dispatch allowance are devices for catching the moment of crisis. University counseling offices, peer supporters, and channels where people speak from behind an avatar take charge of the time before that moment arrives. The side that prevents crises and the side that takes them in cannot stand in for each other, and a system equipped with only one side remains half a system. How long it takes for the amendment before the National Assembly to pass the standing committee and reach students depends on the schedule from here on.
