A Co-Pilot's Suicide: Who Will Disclose Depression Now?

The battle of mental illness is not about the sufferer battling his or her symptoms, as you might think. It’s about fighting the insidious stigma that causes shame, making it difficult to seek treatment and to stay there for as long as you need help. This stigma will only be intensified by last month's awful Germanwings airplane crash and the assumption, now apparently supported by evidence, that its depressed co-pilot turned his suicide into mass murder. Few depressed people would ever embrace indiscriminate annihilation, no matter how overwhelmed or desperate they might feel. Psychologists know this. Social workers and psychiatrists who actively treat troubled people also know that most who suffer do so with stoicism, or by turning inward, rather than directing it at others. Yet once again public perception is dominated by the photograph of a young man whose symptoms and psychiatric diagnosis will be forever linked with destruction beyond ordinary ken.

“What do you think about that man and what he did?” I’ve been asked again and again since the first black box was found. “Does depression make people commit mass murder along with suicide?” “Now I can never talk about my depression,” one person says. “I can’t imagine letting my son get that diagnosis,” says another. “How would he ever find a job?”

In May 2001, at the 40th anniversary celebration of New Haven’s Fellowship Place, a center for people with mental illness, I watched authors Kay Redfield Jamison and William Styron plead with an overflowing audience of mental health professionals and civic leaders, begging them to reveal their personal mental illness struggles. “The only way to counter our society’s powerful stigma is for those of us who have recovered and gone on to lead successful, fulfilling lives to make ourselves known.” In April 2015, this remains true.

A few weeks ago, the world’s attention was riveted on the Germanwings crash. Now we face the fallout: “I don’t know if I’ll ever fly again!” “How can any pilot be trusted?”

In a recent Yale Alumni magazine article, a law school graduate discussing mental illness captures the essence of it. Asked why neither she nor other classmates who were dealing with serious mental illness in law school didn’t speak about it with anyone, she answers, “Oh, stigma. Nobody says ‘Hi, I’m so-and-so and I suffer from major depression.’ I kind of think this is the next civil rights issue,” she says. “We’ve kind of gotten through race, sexual orientation, gender—we haven’t solved any of them, but have made a lot of progress." Mental illness, she says, will remain taboo until more people “come out of the closet” and disclose their personal struggles.

Would you rather trust the person who is confident enough to speak about his or her mental illness or the person who hides it?

For decades I hid my own psychiatric history. In my late fifties, prompted by events I'll discuss in a future blog, I decided I needed to go public. I spent another decade barely inching toward full disclosure, gradually revealing more to broader audiences. My efforts have met only affirmation, not scorn—at least so far.

It’s scary outside the closet, but our community is growing. The internet makes it possible for like-minded individuals to find one another. Desperation comes from feeling alone, hopeless and overwhelmed, being trapped. Rather than let the Germanwings tragedy leave us dismayed, because even as experienced clinicians we can't explain why he did it or know how to make sure it never happens again, let’s do what we can do to address the stigma, which wreaks its own havoc.

Yes, we as professionals and public figures may indeed risk losing prestige if we talk about our depression or bipolar disorder or PTSD. But with enough voices raised, we might actually change the perception of mental illness, rather than diminish our own stature. Imagine a society where psychiatric symptoms weren’t identified with danger, to be feared and shunned, but instead evoked a familiar range of conditions to be understood, treated, and healed. Imagine that by daring to speak now, we’ll save lives.