The temptation, when pondering the actions of Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz, is to wonder at how our fellows are “unknowable”. For all the analysis, how close we will ever get to discerning what went on in Lubitz’s mind? Yet perhaps there is a lesson in discriminating between what he did and the general, overwhelming, chatter about the effects of depression.
It will take years for the courts to establish whether Lufthansa was responsible for knowingly employing someone who was unfit for service. But what Lubitz did doesn’t belong within a definition of depression – it was murder. You can’t spend 10 minutes listening to your colleague pleading for his life and the lives of everyone else on the plane while watching the mountains rise up to meet you without belonging to a different order of being, the tiny minority of out-and-out killers.
Elsewhere, beyond the brutal act of a Lubitz, no matter how hard you try, you can’t rinse the working population of mental illness. “Everyone,” a friend said to me last summer,”‘should have at least one really good breakdown in a lifetime.” Strong medicine, we both agreed as we walked down the road in search of dinner, but think how good it would be for the economy.
If you knew everyone whom you employed had already been through the worst, if you knew they could deal with calamity, depression and the balmy lure of death, but still remained gratefully attached to this earth, then wouldn’t that improve things enormously? OK, so a total personality reboot might be a bit too demanding, but surely one could specify at least one episode of dependence on SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors), maybe a couple of spells in rehab and some definitive medical proof of a John Grant/WH Auden overdose.
The World Health Organisation calculates that any one time there are 350 million people suffering from depression. But depression is to the 21st century what hysteria was to the 19th: a blanket term for everything from stress and overload at work to torments of the spirit for which there are no conventional definitions.
Clinical depression has a much-disputed tick-list of symptoms , but, as Lubitz’s former girlfriend pointed out, he would have been aware of all those symptoms and equally aware of all the ways to pretend he didn’t suffer from them. There’s no psychological test in the world that could separate out all the thousands of honourable and conscientious pilots who fly blamelessly from place to place every day of their working lives and one rogue killer whose aim was to be remembered for an atrocity.
Of course, when employees become responsible for other people’s lives, companies must check and test and check again. But by attempting to remove all the people who have ever suffered from depression or drunk too much or emerged from a breakdown, you render the few who remain more fragile, not less. A beige population with no life experience, no understanding of failure or grief, is also lacking in the insight and strength that the low moments can bring. Machines, in other words. The point being that, should you live to tell the tale, one good breakdown makes you a better person, not a worse one.
