[VIDEO] A day of a Korean psychiatrist living in a country that won't adm...

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A day of a Korean psychiatrist living in a country that won't admit it needs one

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By

Yu Seung-eun

Published

May 20, 2026 6:03 pm

KST

Updated

May 20, 2026 6:04 pm

KST

South Korea has held the highest suicide rate in the OECD for years — more than double the global average. It also has one of the lowest doctor-to-patient ratios in the developed world. The math is grim, and well-documented. What it doesn't explain is why so many Koreans who need help still won't walk through a psychiatrist's door.

The reason often comes down to two letters and a number.

In Korea's national health insurance system, every psychiatric visit is logged under an "F code" — the classification used for mental and behavioral disorders. F32 for depression. F41 for anxiety. F90 for ADHD. The codes are protected by medical confidentiality law and cannot be shared without the patient's consent.

And yet the fear of the F code is one of the most persistent reasons Koreans avoid psychiatric care. Patients worry the code will resurface — in a future insurance application, a background check, some unspecified moment where a single record might cost them something. It is a fear shaped less by what the law permits than by what Korean society still quietly believes: that depression is a weakness of will, that anxiety is something you should push through, that a psychiatric record is a mark that follows you.

A handful of doctors have spent the last decade trying to change that — not by reforming the system from the outside, but by lowering the threshold from within.

Dr. Huh Gyu-hyeong, is one of them. A psychiatrist who openly lives with ADHD himself, Heo has become one of the most recognized faces of Korean mental health care over the past nine years. His clinic in Seoul sees a steady stream of patients each day. His evenings belong to something else entirely — the 'Brain Rich People,' a project born during his military service that now reaches hundreds of thousands of Koreans.

In our latest Korean Next Door episode, we spend a day with Dr. Huh to see what it actually looks like to practice psychiatry in a country still learning how to talk about its own mind.

Watch the full episode on the Korea Times' Howdy Korea YouTube channel.