These days, it's common to make jokes about investors killing themselves or stockbrokers leaping off ledges, but suicide is not a funny subject and especially so in the South Korean entertainment industry now. Since last year, it's become a minor epidemic.
This month alone, three showbiz-related personalities have taken their own lives. This depressing news brings to seven the number of high-profile suicides in the country's entertainment industry since last year.
On October 2, it was reported actress Choi Jin-sil hung herself in her bathroom. A major star in the 1980s and 90s, the 40-year-old had gone through a high-profile divorce and was also rumoured to be in serious debt.
News reports said her mother told police Choi had been drunk and in tears the night before and she had messaged her assistant asking her to 'take care of [my two] children no matter what happens' and that 'I'm sorry'.
A macabre irony is that Choi was rumoured to have pressured another entertainer, found dead the previous month, to repay a debt. Ahn Jae-hwan killed himself in September by burning charcoal inside his SUV. Business failure seemed to be the motive for this tragedy. He had been missing for about three weeks before his body was found.
Just a day after reeling from Choi's suicide, South Korea was rocked again by the demise of notable personality Jang Chae-won. Only 26, Jang gained infamy last year on a game show - the same show on which she had appeared three years earlier as a man. At that time, the show's judges were asked to guess who among a group of contestants had undergone cosmetic surgery. Three years after her first appearance, Jang appeared again on the show to say she had 'become a woman through transgender surgery'.
