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In prosperous South Korea, a troubling increase in suicide rate Choi Jin-young hanged himself last month with an electrical cord. The 39-year-old actor wasnt getting any work in local TV, police said, and he had been depressed since the suicide of his famous older sister. THIS STORY LETTER FROM SOUTH KOREA: A troubling trend in a prosperous society South Korea suicide rate is highest in the world The sister, Choi Jin-sil, was known as the nations actress. When she hanged herself in her bathroom in October 2008, a wave of sympathetic suicides sweptSouth Korea?and 1,700 people took their lives the following month. Seven months later, former president Roh Moo-hyun jumped off a cliff to his death. I cant begin to fathom the countless agonies down the road, he wrote in a note. Then a 20-year-old Chanel model, Daul Kim, killed herself, posting a blog entry that said: Mad depressed and overworked. Another said: The more I gain, the more lonely it is. And so it ends for 35 South Koreans a day. The suicide rate in this prosperous nation of about 50 million people has doubled in the past decade and is now the highest in the industrialized world. The rate of suicide in most other wealthy countries peaked in the early 1980s, but the toll in South Korea continues to climb. Twenty-six people per 100,000 committed suicide in 2008 (the most recent year for which data are available). Thats 2 1/2 times the rate in the United States and significantly higher than in nearby?Japan, where suicide is deeply embedded in the culture. Before South Korea got rich, wired and worried, its suicide rate was among the lowest in the industrialized world. But modernity has spawned inordinate levels of stress. People here work more, sleep less and spend more money per capita on cram schools than residents of the 29 other industrialized countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Still, it remains a taboo here to admit to feeling overwhelmed by stress. The word p