Opinion

Tribune. brett hetherington

Journalist and writer. bretthetherington.net

Germanwings, depression and blame

The re­cent Ger­man­wings 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.

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