This study investigates the phenomenon of increased emergency room visits by teenagers following the broadcast of ‘High School Rapper 2’, which features self-harm in its lyrics. The rate of emergency room visits for self-harm among adolescents aged 10 to 24 notably increased during and shortly after the program. Specifically, in the 10-14 age group, visits per 100,000 population tripled from 0.9 to 3.1. For those aged 15-19, the rate rose from 5.7 to 10.8, and in the 20-24 age group, it increased from 7.3 to 11.0. This study aims to clarify the relationship between lyrics and self-harm rates among adolescents. We analyzed the lyrics of the top 20 songs performed on Melon, a popular music streaming platform for teenagers, from April to October 2018. Using Python's KoNLPy and Kkma libraries for tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and stop-word filtering, we identified the top 50 frequently appearing words and narrowed them down to the top 20 contextually significant words. A correlation analysis (Pearson R) with "Emergency Department Visits due to Self-Harm" data revealed that the words 'sway', 'think', 'freedom' and 'today' had a statistically significant correlation (p < 0.05). Additionally, we found that males’ self-harm tendency was less influenced by the broadcast compared to females. This research suggests a computational approach to understanding the influence of music lyrics on adolescent self-harm behavior. This pilot study demonstrated correlations between specific words in K-pop lyrics and increased adolescent self-harm rates, with notable gender differences.
