The co-pilot was depressed and receiving psychiatric care

His girlfriend had left him, and there were other problems. The Times (London) reports that Lufthansa knew that he was in psychiatric care.

I shall go out on a limb here, and expect the usual reaction from those who insist that mental illness is treated like physical illness. I have always been completely against that, though I can see that the people who campaign for this mean very well and that their concerns are genuine.

The fact is that mental illness and physical illness are completely different, and there is a reason why people have concerns about those with mental illness, concerns which they do not have about people with physical illness. Physical illness does not make people behave in weird ways that are a danger to themselves and others. It does not make them unpredictable and it does not put them in the high-risk category. Mental illness does. That’s why people treat those with mental illness differently to those with physical illness, and they are right.

It’s a safety issue. It doesn’t mean that people with mental illness should be treated like pariahs – of course not. But it does mean that they should not be treated like people with physical illness and left in their jobs, when they might imperil themselves and above all, many others.

Stop treating mental illness as though it’s like physical illness. Stop talking about mental illness as though it’s like diabetes, or cancer. It’s not. It’s different. Mental illness by its very definition changes an individual’s thoughts and behaviour. That is what identifies it for what it is.

Depressed people in psychiatric care need to be kept away from their jobs if those jobs involve responsibility for anything at all. You don’t take risks with the lives and property of others (or yours) just to be politically correct. People with mental illness can be dangerous. This co-pilot might not have been the type to bring out a knife and stab people indiscriminately, but that does not mean his level of emotional detachment from those anonymous people in the back of his plane would not prevent him from taking them down with him.

The trouble is that you never know what a seemingly harmless person with mental illness can do until it’s too late. So don’t take the risk to begin with. Mental illness is exactly what it says on the tin. It is not diabetes. It is not hypertension.