Friday 27 March 2015 11.38 GMT

The media is today reporting that Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz may have been dealing with depression. But claiming a causal link between mental illness and the crash only serves to further stigmatise depression

Whenever a major disaster occurs, it’s a perfectly understandable human reaction that we need to find a reason behind it. However, trying to make sense of a terrible situation is one thing, and falling over ourselves to jump to ridiculous conclusions is quite another. And quite frankly, the UK press should be downright ashamed of themselves today. The way in which they’ve covered the news that Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz may have had depression is abhorrent.

“Madman in cockpit” was the Sun’s effort. “Why on Earth was he allowed to fly?” asked the Daily Mail. In case you’re wondering what the link that’s trying to be made is, the Daily Mirror is here to help: “Killer pilot suffered from depression”. It’s difficult to know where to start with such breathless ignorance about mental health issues, but I’ll give it a go anyway. Again.

We’ll likely never know Lubitz’s state of mind while he was in flight
The crash investigation is still in a very early stage, which means that a lot of information being thrown around about what actually happened is pure conjecture. At any rate, we’ll probably never know what was actually going on in the cockpit, because no one survived the crash. It is therefore irresponsible to make any claims that Lubitz deliberately crashed the plane because of reason X or Y. It’s even more irresponsible to try and link the crash to Lubitz’s mental health. The fact is, we don’t know.

Depression does not make you want to kill people
The media sometimes likes to pretend that it’s making positive steps towards combatting stigmas surrounding all sorts of mental health. It’s really easy to report on campaigns like Time to Change, or cover a story about a new survey explaining how stigmatising attitudes create real problems for people with mental illnesses. That’s not good enough. If we’re serious about improving public attitudes towards mental health, we need to be persistently mindful about how we present potentially stigmatising information in the news. When it comes to the Germanwings crash, we’ve failed miserably today.

Link: http://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2015/mar/27/andreas-lubitzs-germanwings-crash-mental-health-stigma-depression#comments