What psychological evaluations has your airline put in place ?

[MrSnuggles]

Jodelophile,

you should not try to distance-diagnose someone over the Internet. It is also not true that people who commit suicide would "never" kill other people in the process. There are so many ways depression (which we know he had) and psychosis (which we also know he suffered from) can combine to form all kinds of evil, this combination Lubitz had just was the worst.

Just as a thought experiment, humour me on this one:

Imagine you suffer from depression. Depression is nothing like "yeah, I feel a bit low today" or "I am sad that my grandmother died". Depression is a state where you feel (note: ONLY feelings!) that whatever you do, however you do it, you are still worthless, you are unusable, a burden to society. It is a prolonged feeling of helplessness, uselessness and sometimes fatigue. You might not even manage to boil some water for your tea because if you would have to, then you would need to go to the cupboard, you would need to open it, you would need to pick out a pot, you would have to reach for the tap, you would have to start water flowing, you would have to put the pot under the flowing water.... do you understand how many different moves you need to do in order to get your tea? And in the end, what is the use anyway, because you are still worthless with or without tea.

The above is roughly what many depressed people experience. Some people manage to work for a while, when clinically depressed but it will only last for so long until they need sick leave.

If you combine this with a psychotic episode you get all kinds of weird things. Psychotic episodes are not necessarily evil, but the perception of what we usually call "the normal world" is distorted. Psychotic episodes can include paranoia (they are after me! they want to take me!) or hallucinations (as someone described, it was similar to an LSD trip) or a feeling that something is crawling under the skin (this condition has a name: I don't remember it but it is common in meth addicts too).

SPECULATION derived from other textbook cases:

In Lubitz case it seems like his depression made him too distraught to keep up with his job, which then led him in a downward spiral where he started worrying about his financial situation which increased stress, which reduced his ability to perform, which he took as a proof of his worthlessness and down the spiral he must have gone.
Being stressed out about his feelings of uselessness, he developed stress-psychotic eye problems which again he felt even more unusable about.

The reason why he ever took the planeload of people to join him, can never be understood unless someone in a similar situation was apprehended and prohibited from doing something like that. Maybe that person might shed some light on the thought process. It may be something along the lines that he thought he could spare all those people the pain of living. This is actually more common than you think. Murder-suicides within families are mostly committed by people who reason like this. Parents who kill their (small) kids also tell this story in the courtroom. Lubitz might have projected this reasoning on the entire passenger cabin.

I hope you do not interpret my post as a defence for Lubitz. I am just saying that noone needs to be a narcissist or psychopath (sp?) for this to happen. It can be explained by the two facts about his state of mind that we already know.

Sorry for the rant. Mental health and misconceptions of that is a pet peeve of mine.