Hat tip to BiJnD
cross-posted at Roboseyo
Holy crap. This is one of the stories so embarrassing that Korean Tourism should suspend operations and send all its people over to work in Korean mental health programs to improve them, before they continue promoting Korea in conventional ways.
Canada just awarded refugee status to a paranoid-schizophrenic Korean woman, not because her church was out to get her, as her original complaint went, but because Korean mental health care is so poor that it amounts to persecution.
Yep. You read that right. Korean health care is so poor that Canada awarded refugee status to a Korean woman. Vancouver Sun reports.
from the article:
South Koreans with mental illness are treated as an extreme underclass, with one hospital room sleeping 100 women with just 15 mats and no room for personal belongings, according to a letter submitted to the board and written by Daniel Fisher, executive director the National Empowerment Center in Lawrence, Mass.
However, before we get too high on Canada as the greatest country in the world…read some of the comments below the article. Sure, it’s no Korea Times comment board, and some of the people might be right about Canada’s ability to care for its own mental illness patients, but it’s still pretty bad.
22/06/2009 at 2:38 pm Permalink
It also doesn’t do much to portray Korea’s ultra-preachy brand of Christianity in all that great a light, either.