South Korea has become a world-renowned superpower in the last decade. There’s certainly no person who wouldn’t know their world-renowned K-pop music or their Oscar-winning films. This reputation is a matter of jealousy for many, as many other countries cannot compete with their influence in these markets. But did this world recognition bring only positive things, or can we also trace the negative consequences of the mixing of two extremely different societies; western and traditional Korean? The process of exchange and mixing began as early as the Joseon period (조선) when South Korea first opened up to outside influence and continues to this day. During this period, there are sections where rapid progress was made very swiftly. If great changes or mixing of culture occur very quickly in society, this has an extremely negative impact on the well-being of all members of a culture whose power is waning due to the intrusion of a foreign and new culture. One of the more serious consequences of mixing of the two cultures is an increase in the number of suicides, which so far have been mostly treated from a health, psychological and economic perspective, but unfortunately, there is a lack of treatment from a sociological perspective. Durkheim was one of the leading authors who first dealt with the sociological side of suicide, and in his work Suicide (1897) he hypothesized the danger of an occurrence that was then still unknown to the public, but unfortunately can be found in South Korean society today, especially among the elderly.
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