Besides the victims and their families, there’s another group of people who have suffered from the crash of the Germanwings flight in the Alps — the mentally ill.
The gory details are familiar to everyone — co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 27, locked the pilot out of the cockpit and flew the plane into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
In the aftermath, there has been much talk about Lubitz’s mental health, including his suicidal tendencies and his history of depression. It’s a convenient theory, albeit a useless one. Mental illness does not make people immoral.
A depressed person does not morph into a killer. A suicidal person seeks death for himself, not necessarily because he wants to die but because he sees it as the only solution to intolerable pain.
In the process of that suicide ideation, he does not make plans to murder others. Suicide is not the same thing as homicide and what Lubitz did is the latter, repeatedly accelerating to hasten the collision with the mountain.
Quoted in the Atlantic a few days ago, Duke University psychiatry professor Jeffrey Swanson said, “The vast majority of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression are not likely to do anything violent and never will.”
Nor do people who are depressed and/or suicidal say sinister things like: “One day, I will do something that will change the system and everyone will then know my name and remember me,” as Lubitz purportedly said to a former girlfriend.
That sounds more like the dark vision of someone who is just plain evil.
People suffering from depression or feeling suicidal are still the same people they were before the depression descended or their situations became so intolerable that they began to see suicide as an escape.
A well-known poem about cancer details all the things the disease cannot do to those who have it. Depression can’t do certain things to people, either.
The fact that the black-box tapes recorded Lubitz’s breathing as perfectly calm and regular as he steered the plane into the mountain, while the captain pounded on the door demanding to be let into the cockpit, and the passengers screamed as they realized death was imminent, points to pure evil as the cause of the crash.
Meanwhile, all this only adds to the stigma that Canadians with mental illness must bear. They are already leery of talking about their illness, afraid of being labelled crazy. When they see that someone’s heinous act is being linked to his depression, their sense of self-worth, already fragile in the throes of depression, takes a big hit.
According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, “almost one half (49 per cent) of those who feel they have suffered from depression or anxiety have never gone to see a doctor about this problem. Stigma or discrimination attached to mental illnesses presents a serious barrier, not only to diagnosis and treatment, but also to acceptance in the community.”
Approximately eight per cent of Canadians will suffer a major depressive episode in their lifetime, according to the CMHA:
“Suicide accounts for 24 per cent of all deaths among 15- to 24-year-olds and 16 per cent among 25- to 44-year-olds. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in both men and women from adolescence to middle age.”
All the good that coming out of the mental-health closet has done, such as when Margaret Trudeau and Olympian Clara Hughes went public about their battles with depression, gets negated when pundits who have no clue as to Lubitz’s motive link it to depression and suicidal tendencies.
Writing in Slate, Dr. Anne Skomorowsky, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, said she didn’t know what was behind Lubitz’s actions:
“Act completely blasé, then lock the pilot out of the cockpit, and deliberately crash a plane full of people. I don’t know what that is but it’s not depression.”
Mental illness does not turn people into monsters. They had to be monsters to begin with to commit the kind of crime Lubitz did.
Naomi Lakritz is a columnist with the Calgary Herald.
The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@theprovince.com. Letters to the editor can be sent to provletters@theprovince.com.
