Lessons from Lubitz - why the blame game should carry a health warning

When tragedy strikes, it is human nature to search for the reasons for that tragedy, to ask why, and to portion blame.

This week has seen two contrasting examples of this.

For those people who were infected with HIV or Hepatitis C from blood given to them by the NHS, to wait 30 years for an explanation then only to be told by the Penrose inquiry that effectively nothing could have been done, must have been very difficult.

In contrast for the families of those who died in the Germanwings A320 plane crash the inquiry is being done swiftly and in full glare of the media. Several airlines have pledged to change the rules to ensure there are always two crew members in the cockpit, after data from the plane’s voice recorder suggested the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz purposely flew the plane into the ground, killing 150 people.

Lubitz, we now know, had depression, and the blame game has shifted onto processes of psychological assessments.

“Why on earth was he allowed to fly” screeches this morning’s Daily Mail.

But this line of inquiry must carry its own health warning, because the use of mental ill-health as a reason for this awful tragedy ignores two truths: healthy people do bad things all the time, and mental health problems are incredibly common. Everyone has mental health, and there will be times when we are healthier than others. One in Four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year, are we suggesting a quarter of us should not be allowed to fly?

Depression itself is very common. Psychological assessments will not predict or prevent rare tragedies such as this one. They cannot. And by treating mental ill-health as a cause of this tragedy, we tread very close to the stigma of treating those who suffer as dangerous, a stigma which campaigners have spent as many decades fighting as the victims of blood infections have waited for answers which never came.