The
recent Germanwings airline tragedy has naturally been the focus for
countless media stories. Many of us in Catalonia know people who were
acquainted with victims and their families but there is another
personal aspect to the crash that seems to provoke strong reactions
in those who have no direct connection to it.
Because
most of the developed world now travels by air at least a few times a
year, we are aware, at least semi-consciously, that every time we
step on board a flight we are putting our lives in the hands of a
small number of people - most particularly the pilots. It’s
understandable and even maybe logical that we look for something or
someone to blame when a plane is the cause of 150 deaths. Our
instincts for justice demand an explanation. Now it has become clear
that the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, made a conscious decision to commit
suicide/mass-murder and used his plane as a weapon. We also know that
Lubitz had suffered from a severe depressive episode while training
to be a pilot in 2009 and was receiving regular medical treatment
right up to the day that he plowed the plane into a French mountain.
According to his former doctors this treatment was for physical
problems, not psychological ones.
What
we do not know though, and most probably could never know is exactly
why he chose to end his own life in such a horrific way. Lubitz had
reportedly told an ex-girlfriend “One day I will do something...and
everyone will then know my name and remember me.” This gives an
egotistical motive for his actions but does not adequately explain
much else. One of the most important points that arises here, and one
that a lot of media has distorted or missed altogether, is that
depression does not create homicidal maniacs.
A
depressed person is actually highly unlikely to take others with them
to the grave and the vast majority of people with depression do not
hurt anyone because suicide is the main extreme risk, not violence.
In this same column in December last year I wrote that “Today
too, there are increasing numbers of people who are not only
acknowledging their own depression or mental illness but are speaking
openly about it in public forums and in the media.” Unfortunately,
Andreas
Lubitz was not someone who believed that he could do anything like
this and apparently went to great trouble to hide his interior
struggles from his employers. If he had found the right help, he and
his unwitting victims, almost all of them strangers to him, might
well have lived.
The
statistics show that most murder-suicides happen in domestic
settings, and involve a male and his spouse. Murder-suicides
involving pilots or in gun massacres are, in fact, a great deal
rarer. Lubitz himself then does not fit a standard type or pattern
but I would speculate that he was a man (75% of suicides are men) who
was overwhelmed with the complications of a high-pressure job and was
desperate and confused. In an extravagant gesture, he had just bought
matching Audi’s for himself and his current girlfriend, who was
pregnant.
There
is a real danger that Lubitz’s violence unfairly creates a greater
stigma for those who have psychiatric problems and that men in
particular will be less likely to talk to mental health professionals
or even family and friends. I have had a limited, short-term personal
experience with depression and would hate to see a major tragedy like
this one lead to a deeper code of silence about the difficulties of
the human mind.
[This
article was first published in Catalonia
Today magazine, May 2015.]
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