Even so, the total number of suicides in New York City has dropped: there were 339 in the first 10 months of this year, or about 34 per month, down from 39 per month in 2008 and 39.4 in 2007, officials said. (National statistics are not yet available for the past three years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

The rise in suicides among Koreans in New York, however, mirrors an increase in South Korea, where the suicide rate last year was 26 per 100,000 people, up from 24.8 in 2007 and 21.8 in 2006, said Dr. Myung-Soo Lee, director of the Seoul Suicide Prevention Center.

Image Soonhee, left, and Yongho Kim. Credit... The Korea Times

This month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that South Korea had the highest rate among its 30 member nations, based on 2006 statistics. A number of prominent South Koreans have killed themselves this year, including former President Roh Moo-hyun, who was implicated in a corruption investigation; Daul Kim, a top South Korean model; and Park Yong-oh, the former chairman of Doosan, South Korea’s oldest business conglomerate.

Some experts trace the increase in the suicide rate, in part, to the nation’s rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a booming industrial power. Traditional family support systems have fractured, age-old value systems have dissolved and materialism has flourished, they say. And those changes continue to steer the lives of recent emigrants to America.

“We are thinking that we’re living in the United States, but we still keep the value of the higher expectations and higher achievements,” said Mr. Yoon, of the Asian Outreach Clinic, who immigrated from South Korea a decade ago.

Among the Koreans who killed themselves this year in the New York region was Won Jo Lee, 36, a cabdriver whose body was found, shot in the head, on Sept. 6 in his apartment in Bayside, Queens, the Korean Consulate said. The Korea Times reported that Mr. Lee had been suffering financial difficulties, and it quoted his roommate as saying he had recently been laid off.