South Korean actor Song Yoo-jung passes away at 26

Written by Tiffany May and Youmi Kim
26-year-old actor Song Yoo-jung was discovered lifeless on Saturday in Seoul, South Korea, the newest lack of a younger performer within the nation’s leisure business, which has confronted a reckoning over the psychological well being burden on its glamorous stars.
The demise of Song Yoo-jung, who appeared in a number of tv dramas, was confirmed in an announcement by the corporate that represented her, Sublime Artist Agency. The company didn’t disclose the trigger, however the suddenness of Song’s demise dropped at thoughts the sequence of suicides that has plagued Korean pop music in recent times.
Alarms have lengthy been raised over the pressures imposed by South Korean administration corporations on younger entertainers, a lot of whom are groomed beginning as youngsters to be pop idols. Their appears to be like are intently scrutinized, and their tightly choreographed lives are sometimes broadcast on social media platforms that expose them to each adulatory fan mail and hateful feedback.
For many, their time within the limelight is proscribed, in the event that they ever attain star standing. By their late 20s, some are thought-about replaceable.
Numerous Okay-pop stars who’ve taken their very own lives spoke of struggles with their psychological well being and the toll of cyberbullying. Song, an up-and-coming actor, had not talked about publicly any such points.
Song started her performing profession at 20 and appeared in commercials for Estée Lauder skincare merchandise and for the ice cream chain Baskin-Robbins. In her breakout function in 2019, Song performed a fresh-faced structure pupil with a pixie reduce, trying to find her soul mate, in an online sequence referred to as Dear My Name. She additionally acted in music movies.
She was an advocate for folks with disabilities, serving as ambassador for a South Korean group referred to as Warm Accompaniment.
Song’s company referred to as her “a great actress who performed with passion.” It didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
The downside of suicide in South Korea isn’t restricted to the leisure business. The nation has the very best suicide charge among the many 37 developed nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But celeb suicides, involving actors and others, have been a fixture within the South Korean information media over the previous decade or extra. In latest years, consideration has fallen most sharply on deaths within the Okay-pop business, one of many nation’s most profitable cultural exports.
In 2017, a singer, Kim Jong-hyun, killed himself at 27 after leaving a notice saying that he had been overcome by despair.
In 2019, Sulli, a 25-year-old Okay-pop star, took her personal life after she had complained in regards to the relentless cyberbullying she confronted upon becoming a member of a feminist marketing campaign that advocated not carrying bras.
About six weeks later, her buddy Goo Hara, 28, additionally killed herself, leaving a handwritten notice about her despair.
Goo had tried to cause with on-line critics, asking them to chorus from vicious feedback.
“Public entertainers like myself don’t have it easy — we have our private lives more scrutinized than anyone else and we suffer the kind of pain we cannot even discuss with our family and friends,” she wrote.