Anti-suicide system installed on bridge
2013-01-10 14:28
Seoul - The South Korean capital Seoul has installed
anti-suicide monitoring devices on bridges over the city's Han River after 196
people jumped to their deaths last year, officials said on Thursday.
The new initiative - in a country with the highest
suicide rate among leading developed nations - incorporates closed-circuit
television cameras programmed to recognise motions that suggest somebody might
be preparing to jump from a bridge.
Detection of a potential suicide sounds an automatic
alarm which would result in emergency services and counsellors being dispatched
to the location in three minutes.
"The new system has been put in place on two
bridges," a city official in charge of the project told AFP.
"We will expand the system to the other Han River
bridges if testing until March proves effective."
One of the initial two locations is the Mapo Bridge, a
suicide hot spot chosen by nearly 90% of the 196 people who leaped to their
deaths from bridges last year, a figure up sharply from 57 in 2003.
Signs
In an earlier attempt to address the growing number of
suicides, the municipal government posted signs along the Mapo Bridge last
September with messages including "The best part of your life is yet to
come" and "Worries are nothing".
In the middle of the bridge it placed a statue of an
older man comforting a worried-looking younger one, pinching his cheek and
placing a protective arm on his shoulders.
Suicide, fuelled by intense pressure for academic and
career achievement, has become a perennial blight on a country whose rapid
economic development has otherwise raised living standards and encouraged
social mobility.
South Korea has the highest suicide rate among members of
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, with an average of
33.5 people per 100 000 taking their lives in 2010, far higher than Hungary
(23.3) and Japan (21.2), which ranked second and third.
The figure for South Korea equates to nearly 50 suicides
a day and shows a steep increase from 2 000 when the average incidence of suicide
was 13.6 people per 100 000.
- SAPA
