Eight injured in capital-area subway when man goes on ten-minute rampage with box-cutter

A ten-minute "rampage" that occurred on the subway system in Ŭjijŏngbu (Uijeongbu) was substantial enough that it got picked up by the Associated Press and ended up in the likes of the Washington Post.

I'm not sure if the 39-year-old Mr Yoo deliberately set out that day to stab or slice a bunch of people with a boxcutter (the same type of device the terrorists used to gain control of the aircraft during the 9/11 attacks) or if something just set him off and that's what he grabbed. Whatever the case, it would seem Mr Yoo is mentally ill, and it would almost be blogger malpractice to not point out how authorities in Korea need to do a better job of seeking out such individuals and getting them help, rather than just ignoring them and hoping they'll go away.

Of course, the government is already trying to do a bit of proactive preventive care in this regard, with its plans for mandated mental health checkups, which hopefully will remove (or at least bypass) much of the social stigma against being michŏtta ["crazy"] that prevents so many people from getting the help they need.

From the AP, via WaPo:

A man wielding a box-cutter stabbed or cut eight people at a subway station just outside of South Korea's capital after a teenager confronted him for spitting at him, police said Sunday.

No one died in the 10-minute rampage Saturday and the injuries weren't life-threatening, according to three police officers who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk to the media. Police arrested a man running away from the station in Uijeongbu, which is home to U.S. and South Korean military bases, the officers said.

Police identified the suspect as a 39-year-old man surnamed Yoo.

Yoo began wielding a box cutter at an 18-year-old man surnamed Park inside the train when the victim confronted Yoo for spitting at him, police said. Infuriated when Park said he would call police, Yoo began brandishing the cutter on a train and then on a station platform until he was arrested, Uijeongbu Police Station said in a statement released Sunday.

Yoo, who is unemployed and lives alone, was on his way to find work in Seoul on the subway, police said.

The Korea Times has more detail on the story, referring to Mr Yoo as a "day laborer," suggesting he is a generally unemployed which would fit with my theory of someone suffering from untreated mental illness who has fallen through the cracks — until he lands on someone.

The KT report includes the typical reporting of what the perpetrator says set him off, in this case "being told off." As an aside, the risk in reporting such claims is that it can easily seem as if the Korean news media is excusing the criminal behavior or at least offering mitigating circumstances that suggest reduced punishment or release, when in fact not such thing is intended. It is akin to how American news media constantly refers to alleged criminals allegedly having done things — even when we know perfectly well they did it — as a nod to the criminal justice system's ideal of "innocent until proven guilty" in a court of law.

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Dramatic rates of autism in South Korea? (UPDATED)

The New York Times is reporting on a study conducted in the Seoul suburb of Ilsan that yielded rates of autism double what they are in the industrialized world:

An ambitious six-year effort to gauge the rate of childhood autism in a middle-class South Korean city has yielded a figure that stunned experts and is likely to influence the way the disorder’s prevalence is measured around the world, scientists reported on Monday.

The figure, 2.6 percent of all children aged 7 to 12 in the Ilsan district of the city of Goyang, is more than twice the rate usually reported in the developed world. Even that rate, about 1 percent, has been climbing rapidly in recent years — from 0.6 percent in the United States in 2007, for example.

But experts said the findings did not mean that the actual numbers of children with autism were rising, simply that the study was more comprehensive than previous ones.

“This is a very impressive study,” said Lisa Croen, director of the autism research program at Kaiser-Permanente Northern California, who was not connected with the new report. “They did a careful job and in a part of the world where autism has not been well documented in the past.”

As with so many other social or medical ills, there is always a risk that a changing definition or closer scrutiny can alter the statistics one is putting together, and that may be at work here.

At the same time, however, among older fathers and older mothers there is an increased risk one's child will develop autism (my parents sent me a newspaper clipping of that article shortly after I started my PhD in Hawaii, a warning that I might very well be forty-something when I eventually have kids). The connection I'm making is that the average age of giving birth has gone up significantly in Korea as more South Koreans go to college and more SoKo women seek careers before getting married. I wonder if that might be a part of the increase.

For most South Koreans, I think the movie Marathon is the face of autism (called cha•p'yet•chŭng, 자폐증). Such depictions may make more SoKos aware of the issue, and possibly somewhat more sympathetic, but not necessarily less alarmed by the prospect of their child having that condition. There is still great stigma attached to any problem perceived to be mentally based, but if more and more people are diagnosed with this, we might reach a critical mass where it is seen as a routine condition that simply needs to be managed and dealt with rather than frightened or repulsed by.

UPDATE:
NBC News in the United States has used the report as an anchor for a wider report on autism:

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