[Anchor]

Individuals with mental illness who pose a risk of harming themselves or others are subject to emergency hospitalization. While the number of such cases has surged dramatically, it has been confirmed that public hospital beds to accommodate them are severely lacking. As a result, police officers are forced to experience so-called emergency room "hospital hopping."

This is an exclusive report by Kwon Min-kyu.

[Reporter]

A man holding a lighter in front of a gas station stands in a standoff with dispatched police officers.

[Stay still! Calm down! Calm down!]

This man, suffering from mental illness, even bit a police officer's arm during the rampage.

[Officer Jung Geon / Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency Mental Emergency Joint Response Team: "He said, 'Someone is trying to kill me, they're chasing me.' He showed classic symptoms of bipolar disorder, so we were subduing him when he bit my wrist..."]

Under South Korean law, the first person to discover an individual with mental illness who poses a risk of harming themselves or others can request emergency hospitalization with the consent of a doctor and a police officer.

In most cases, police officers responding to reports become the first discoverers and request the emergency hospitalization.

Since procedures for involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals by guardians or acquaintances were tightened in 2017, police requests for emergency hospitalization have surged nearly fourfold over the past five years.

[Officer Jung Sang-hoon / Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency Mental Emergency Response Team: "If there used to be about three or four cases a day, now it has increased to up to around ten cases on busy days. Emergency medical technicians cannot physically subdue individuals (by law)."]

Emergency hospitalizations are mostly carried out through public hospital beds, but there are fewer than 200 such beds nationwide, including regions like Daejeon and Gangwon, which have only two such beds each.

Given this situation, in Gwangju and South Jeolla Province last August, a mentally ill person who attempted suicide was admitted to a hospital in Busan only after 28 hours, and there was even a case where they wandered among 29 hospitals for 33 hours.

[Officer Jung Sang-hoon / Gyeonggi Nambu Provincial Police Agency Mental Emergency Response Team: "We called dozens of places. We are trying our best, but since we are not a medical institution or anything like that..."]

In some countries such as Australia, while they receive help from police and fire services, separate dedicated institutions handle emergency hospitalizations.

[Lee Kwang-hee / National Assembly Public Administration and Security Committee Member (Democratic Party of Korea): "Along with expanding mental health professionals, shouldn't we establish a national transport team? We actively propose this to the relevant ministries..."]

It is time to consider improvements to the overall emergency hospitalization system, not only to reduce the so-called emergency hospitalization hospital hopping by police officers, but also to ensure proper treatment and transport for individuals with mental illness.

(Camera: Joo Yong-jin | Video Editing: Kim Jun-hee | Design: Yang Gi-tae | Data provided by the office of lawmaker Lee Kwang-hee)