"Germanwings, depression and blame" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

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.]

"The best of times?" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Has there ever been a better time to be alive in the history of our tortured, super-intelligent species? 

At the press of a few buttons we have virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the last several hundred (or is it thousand?) years available. And it is available fast.

We have the answers to a billion conceivable questions and we can communicate almost instantly with the majority of people on the planet, language barriers excepted. 

For many of us, our taste buds can be stimulated by the food from dozens of cultures who, just a few short years ago were out of reach, either geographically or economically. 

In this increasingly mixed European society, young people have started to grow up sitting next to others from Asia, Africa and assorted parts of the wider continent and for them this is as natural as mother's milk.

On top of all this, there is a gentleness that in so many senses did not exist just a generation ago. 

A man can be intimately involved in the care of his baby or child without automatically being a figure of gossip or ridicule. He can be the main cook for his family and not be thought of us somehow suspect. 

Finally too, homosexuals are more accepted or at least tolerated in the majority of circles, rather than being chemically castrated as some were less than seventy years ago (in the UK for example.)

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. 

Such a development was virtually unthinkable merely a decade ago. 

Equally though, the average women in the developed world has a wider horizon than ever before. Her place in the workplace is now barely questioned at all, though she may still be paid less than a man or have trouble getting a full-time position or promoted according to her ability.

Yet despite this progress, despite the modern mind being freer from superstition and religious dogma than probably any time in history, what do we also have?

Underneath the shiny towers of vanity there is a great, putrid sewer stench of injustice. 

There is the distinct sensation of a nausea without relief and that comes from having both your eyeballs open and your ears unblocked. Anyone who chooses to not be ignorant knows, as Leonard Cohen wrote, "the deal is rotten." 

And all those signs of enlightenment that came to view in the the first half of the 20th century now have a faded quality and there is a hollow ring to the chants, songs and poems of social movements.

Throw into this mix the fact that the warming of the earth continues at pace. 

It is only those who genuinely don't understand or politicians who have been bought out by the polluting industries that do not accept the truth of the overheating globe that we walk on. 

Or think of the wealth that flows through financial systems. Shockingly, the 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion. 

And what else?

There's the vacant look of history's books

Slave labour and murder thy neighbour

Greed as a virtue and carers that hurt you

This is the present we have

We see the limp hand of the state and rape-a-date

The power of one at the point of a gun

And the good times are back with daily Prozac

This is the future that right now we have

See that liar's smile when the truth's on trial?

This is the justice we have.

Living and laughing in ignorance bliss

We have fashioned a world exactly like this.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.]