OpEd - SubScribe

The commentators 30-03-15

...on depression and the plane crash

People with depressive illness don’t go on killing sprees. They’re too busy hiding behind their front door or summoning the energy to do the washing up. They don’t want to kill other people, they want to kill themselves, so let’s not use the word as lazy catchphrase for all mental illness. That’s rather like using the word cancer to describe all physical illnesses. There are as many forms of mental illness as there are physical.
- Sally Brampton, Independent

Many people suffer from sadness, depression or family and romantic failure, yet most of the time we are all safe in one another’s hands. We should rejoice in that. Buses, taxis, road engineering, bridges, ships, planes, food production — all depend on the faithfulness, dutifulness and instinctive mutual protection of workers at all levels. We trust hundreds, daily. Murders are rare, unless in countries fallen into desperate disarray. - Libby Purves, The Times

There have been other reports of suicidal pilots crashing planes but none as detailed and graphic as this. Nor have we heard before about a co-pilot locking a pilot-in-command out of the cockpit, ignoring his frantic banging on the door as the airliner sped down to its destruction. Only one feature of this chilling event is normal. The grumbling of special interest groups who seek to influence our view about what part Andreas Lubitz’s mental problems played.
- Peter McKay, Daily Mail

Out of the window went every ounce of compassion and thoughtfulness and in came the clichés, the crazed maniac theories.
Oh come on, I hear people say, he had to have a screw loose to fly a plane into a mountain.
To which the answer is: there had to be something very wrong to make him do that. But being depressed or losing your girlfriend or suffering burn-out six years ago doesn't cut it. Anyone with an ounce of sense must realise that there has to be more behind this.
- Another chance to get it right, another chance taken to get it wrong

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