Crucial K-dramas about mental health tackling issues from burnout to grief

Sometimes the most radical thing a character can do in a K-drama is stop.

For Lee Yeo-reum, life has become unbearable. After losing her mother and enduring a miserable experience at work, she decides she has had enough. She quits her corporate job, packs a backpack and leaves Seoul for the seaside village of Angok.

Her new life is deliberately simple. With fewer responsibilities and much more time on her hands, Yeo-reum begins confronting her grief and the emotional exhaustion she had been carrying for years. What follows is a quiet story about stepping away from a life that no longer feels sustainable and discovering that doing less can sometimes create room to heal.

Starring Seolhyun and Im Si-wan, Summer Strike is a particularly relatable choice for anyone who has ever fantasised about abandoning their inbox, leaving the city and starting over somewhere nobody knows them. The series is available on Netflix and Viki.

Identical twins can share a face without sharing a life, and Our Unwritten Seoul uses that idea to explore the emotional burdens each sister has been carrying separately.

The sisters decide to temporarily switch identities, creating the kind of setup that K-dramas do exceptionally well: an entertaining premise that gradually reveals much more serious problems underneath. As their lives become intertwined, the drama explores anxiety, exhaustion and the lasting effects of family trauma.

The identity swap gives both women an opportunity to experience a life that looks completely different from their own, while also forcing them to confront problems they have spent years avoiding. The result is a story about family expectations, emotional isolation and the difficulty of breaking patterns that have been passed down through generations.

Park Bo-young, Park Jin-young and Ryu Kyung-soo star in the series, which is available on Netflix.

From the outside, Seo Jae-won appears to have everything under control. She is the successful CEO of a furniture company, has built an impressive career and seems to be living the kind of polished life that would make an enviable K-drama Instagram feed.

Behind closed doors, however, her reality is far more complicated.

As betrayal and long-hidden secrets begin to surface, Jae-won's understanding of her own memories becomes increasingly uncertain. The drama gradually reveals how psychological trauma has affected her perception of events, relationships and even herself.

Jang Na-ra leads the series alongside Son Ho-jun, So Yi-hyun and Lee Ki-taek. Rather than treating mental health as a straightforward obstacle to overcome, My Happy Ending folds it into a tense psychological mystery, making the audience question what Jae-won can trust as the story unfolds. It is available to stream on Viki.

Song Ha-ran has built her life around control. As a successful fashion designer, she maintains a carefully structured existence while carrying unresolved grief and guilt from a devastating loss in her past.

That routine begins to change when she meets Sunwoo Chan, an animator whose own life has been shaped by the aftermath of an accident. Their relationship gradually brings both characters closer to emotions they have tried to keep buried.

Starring Lee Sung-kyung and Chae Jong-hyeop, ‘In Your Radiant Season’ focuses on the quieter side of psychological recovery. Rather than relying on dramatic breakdowns, it looks at how grief can become woven into everyday behaviour and relationships, and how difficult it can be to move forward when the past has never really been processed.

The series is available to stream on Disney+.

Mousetrap follows novelist Je Moon-jae, a deeply isolated man whose severe social anxiety has left him living almost entirely on his own. His solitary existence takes an increasingly bizarre turn when an unknown entity steals his identity, including his name, physical identity and assets.

Forced out of isolation, Moon-jae teams up with a loan shark to track down whoever has taken his life from him. The result is a psychological thriller that combines an unusual science-fiction premise with themes of trauma, isolation and identity.

Ryu Jun-yeol, Sul Kyung-gu and Lee Kyu-hyung star in the series, which is available on Netflix. For viewers who prefer their K-dramas about mental health with considerably more suspense, Mousetrap offers a darker alternative to the healing dramas on this list.

Doctor Slump starts with two people who have achieved exactly what they were supposed to achieve and discover that success has not made them happy.

Nam Ha-neul is an anaesthesiologist whose relentless career has left her exhausted and struggling with depression. Her life takes another turn when she reconnects with Yeo Jeong-woo, a former academic rival who was once a highly successful plastic surgeon.

Jeong-woo's career has also fallen apart after a traumatic medical incident, leaving both doctors at very different points from where they expected to be. When they end up living in the same building, their relationship develops from old rivalry into an unexpected source of support.

Park Shin-hye and Park Hyung-sik bring plenty of the familiar romantic-comedy chemistry to the story, but the drama also spends time with the less glamorous realities of burnout and psychological recovery. Therapy, medication and the difficulty of returning to work after a crisis all become part of the characters' journey, giving the romance something more substantial underneath it.

For fans of K-dramas about mental health who still want plenty of humour, romance and familiar rom-com energy, Doctor Slump offers a particularly accessible entry point.

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