I couldn’t agree less with this piece in The Guardian

A 28-year-old man with a lifelong history of depression – and this when depression in youth is in a whole different category to depression brought on by the desolation of life in later years or by tragedy and sorrow – drives a commercial airliner into a mountainside, taking another 150 people with him, and we are told not to blame his mental illness.

Oh indeed.

His lifelong depression had nothing to do with it, we are told. Oh right. Of course not – because people who are not mentally unbalanced do this kind of thing when they don’t have a terrorism motive.

“It’s inexplicable,’ we are told. Except that it isn’t inexplicable, is it – the explanation is right there but we are not allowed to examine it and discuss it in case other people with depression feel ‘stigmatised’.

What tosh. The fear that many people with depression have is exactly this: they themselves understand only too well that they are capable of destruction. It is precisely people with serious depression who will be sitting there watching the news right now and thinking: “I could have done that. I understand what made him do it.” Depressed people are depressed because they can’t turn their immense anger outwards and direct it inwards instead. They don’t turn their anger outwards because they are afraid that if they do, they might do something like that – except that they are not in charge of a plane, so they can’t.

How many people have ended their lives by driving their car at high speed straight into a concrete wall, over a bridge, or into oncoming traffic? More than we can count. And yet we consider it strange that a young man who was at the controls of a plane rather than the wheel of a car would do exactly the same thing.

Mental illness isn’t normal. Stop trying to portray it that way. This is not the same thing as saying that the mentally ill should be disparaged or treated with anything less than perfect respect, but just as an employer is permitted to ‘let go’ a man with a broken back whose job it was to shift heavy machinery, so an employer should be permitted to ‘let go’ a pilot with a broken mind without fearing the wrath of the political correctness police, the mental illness lobby and the equal opportunities law-enforcers.

I just cannot believe that 150 people have been murdered – yes, murdered, a commercial airliner that cost millions has been destroyed, confidence in flying has been shaken terribly, and the apologists for mental illness are STILL arguing that mental illness is not to blame.

If they are so happy to be flown by a mentally ill pilot, they can jolly well charter their own flights and pick all the depressed pilots they want – but they’ve got to find somebody willing to provide the plane. And while they’re at it, they might throw in a couple of drunks at the controls – why not? After all, we’re now told that alcoholism is a disease.