Yet mental health experts who study mass murder-suicides said that depression and thoughts of suicide, which are commonplace, fall far short of explaining such drastic and statistically rare acts.
Timothy J. McVeigh was spurred by anger at the government to blow up a federal building in 1995.
“People want an easily graspable handle to help understand this, to blame something or scapegoat,” said Dr. James L. Knoll, the director of forensic psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University.
But to zero in on depression is “a low-yield dead end,” he said, adding, “There’s something fundamentally different here, aside and apart from the depression, and that’s where we need to look.”
Serious mental illness, studies of mass killers suggest, is a prime driver in a minority of cases — about 20 percent, according to estimates by several experts. Far more common are distortions of personality — excesses of rage, paranoia, grandiosity, thirst for vengeance or pathological narcissism and callousness.
“The typical personality attribute in mass murderers is one of paranoid traits plus massive disgruntlement,” said Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist in New York who recently completed a study of 228 mass killers, many of whom also killed themselves.
At last some sense and why knee jerk reactions and mass examination and intrusion into pilots personal lives is a waste of time AND AN INFRINGEMENT OF PILOTS HUMAN RIGHTS without identifying the particular personality trait that can murder and plan the murder of 150 people! Depressed people don't do that. As stated above serious mental illness only accounts for 20% of mass murderers indicating that 80% will have no sign of serious mental illness. So where do you go from there filtering out suspect pilots ?