The pilot, depression, and the salacious headlines that feed stigma

“If we don’t keep this extremely rare tragedy in perspective, many more lives will be damaged as a result,” Sue Baker, director of Time to Change, the mental health anti-stigma programme run by the UK mental health charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, warned The BMJ.

French prosecutors said last week that it seemed likely that the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked pilot Patrick Sonderheimer out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed a Germanwings plane in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. This prompted the press to seek out every scrap of information it could gather about Lubitz’s background to speculate on what could have driven him to this act. Drip fed to the public have been details of relationship problems, failing eyesight, torn-up sick notes in his home, and most of all his history of depression.