I just read an article in the NY Times that supports this crazy idea that the guy who flew the jet into a mountain a few weeks ago suffered from depression. The Times article does a great disservice to people everywhere who have depression and suicidal thoughts. The article focuses on the guy's history of mental health treatment and so on, all of which I assume is true. But what journalists and others fail to grasp is that a person has to have a certain level of sociopathy, or more to the point, psychopathy, to choose to end his life while murdering 149 other people. While there may be a certain number of suicidal people who may impulusively drive their car into another car or something of that sort, generally speaking, people who kill themselves are only interested in harming themselves, not others. People who fly passenger planes with people on board into mountains are after something more than their own deaths. It may be notoriety or fame or attention or whatever. Psychopaths kill because they can. They live their lives outside the normal assumptions and rules that govern most people's lives. Whether he was depressed is far less important than the reality that he was very likely a dangerous person, bent on doing something awful.
I don't think airlines have the tools to differentiate between normal depression and a potentially dangerous person. To not recognize the difference between the two in the aftermath of a terrible incident like this one and to paint this bad guy with the same descriptive brush as a person with clinical depression, only serves to feed our ignorance and fear of people with treatable mental illness. We don't yet know how to detect the psychopaths among us. They are usually pretty good at masking their real intentions and fooling the people around them. This guy probably left clues that were ignored that might have gotten him caught before this happened. We don't know and probably never will. But please read with great skepticism newspaper accounts that call this guy "depressed". I spent my career as a mental health therapist. I know from depression. People who I have worked with deserve way way better than to be lumped in the same category as this murderer.
