'Mom'... The Most Frequently Appearing Word in Suicide Victims' Notes

[The Financial News] The most frequently appearing nouns in suicide victims' notes are family-related words such as 'mom', 'mother', 'mommy', as well as 'dad' and 'father'.
The Korea Foundation for Suicide Prevention (KFSP) recently released a report titled 'A Study on the Characteristics of Murder-Suicide through Analysis of Suicide Notes,' which analyzed the characteristics of all 102,538 suicide deaths from 2013 to 2020, including those who died by murder-suicide involving children, parents, or spouses, and other suicide victims.
In the report, KFSP and a research team from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) extracted and analyzed 209 notes from 215 murder-suicide victims and 418 notes from 37,735 other suicide victims using natural language processing.
The results showed that in murder-suicide notes, 'mom', 'mother', and 'mommy' appeared 246 times (3.5%) out of a total of 7,015 nouns, making them the most common, followed by 'dad' and 'father' at 149 times (2.1%).
In the notes of other suicide victims, a total of 13,673 nouns were identified, with 'mom', 'mother', 'mommy' (522 times, 3.8%) and 'dad', 'father' (414 times, 3.0%) also ranking highest.
Expressions referring to parents were the most common in all suicide victims' notes.
This includes messages addressed to one's own mother or father, as well as expressions where the writer refers to themselves as a mom or dad.
In the notes of general suicide victims, aside from 'mom' and 'dad', words such as 'person' (1.7%), 'son' (1.6%), 'words' (1.6%), and 'family' (1.2%) frequently appeared.
On the other hand, in murder-suicide notes, 'money' (1.7%) was the third most frequent noun. In the notes of other suicide victims, the frequency of 'money' was relatively lower at 1.2%.
Meanwhile, when the research team classified emotions in the notes using a model with 28 emotional categories, they found that 'anger', 'excitement', and 'neutral' were more prominent in murder-suicide notes, while 'consideration', 'love', and 'sadness' stood out in the notes of other suicide victims.
Focusing solely on murder-suicide, when the victim was a child, parents in their 30s and 40s mainly cited financial burdens or the child's health issues. When the victim was a parent, those in their 50s and older primarily pointed to caregiving burdens and financial difficulties as the main causes, according to the report.
The researchers suggested that, in order to prevent murder-suicide, multifaceted policy support is needed, such as expanding social security for financial assistance, increasing social services for family conflict resolution, and improving access to psychological counseling.※ If you are struggling with depression or have concerns that are difficult to talk about, or if someone around you is experiencing such difficulties, you can receive 24-hour expert counseling through the Suicide Prevention Hotline at ☎109.jjw@fnnews.com Jung Ji-woo Reporter