How a deadly US epidemic is fuelled by Korean mental health taboo
- Ethnic Koreans in the US are taking their own lives at disproportionately high levels
- Despite moving, Korean immigrants still have to deal with a cultural stigma about mental health treatment and face extreme pressure to succeed
In the middle of the night on April 8, 2006, Binna Kim woke up on the floor of her bedroom in her family’s home in California.
Beneath her was a pool of blood. She was 16 and assumed it was menstrual blood, so she decided to go to the bathroom to change – but when she attempted to get to her feet, she fell back to the floor.
Her head was throbbing. She called out to her parents. No one came. She called out to her younger brother, but he did not respond either. Finally, she crawled to her parents’ bedroom. Her father’s leg hung over the bed. She shook it to try and wake him. When he did not respond, she crawled to a radio and turned it on at full volume to get someone’s attention. Eventually, she dragged herself to the bathroom and used the ledge of the tub to hoist herself up, only to fall back down and lose consciousness. When she came to, she found herself on a stretcher on the way to a hospital.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Binna said, recalling the night’s events. “I tried to make them call my parents to come and pick me up. But obviously they knew something that I didn’t.”
The paramedics would tell her only that she had been shot at her home in Echo Park, Los Angeles.
What do you mean, a murder-suicide? That means that it was someone in my family who did this to me.
That week, there were three family murder-suicides in Southern California’s Korean-American community. On April 2, a 54-year-old local business owner locked himself and his two young children in his SUV and set it on fire in downtown Los Angeles. His T-shirt manufacturing business had failed and his wife had filed for divorce.