Depression — or Antidepressants — More Linked to Cause of Crash?

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In Forbes, David Kroll asks whether antidepressants are more dangerous for commercial pilots to have than depression. And in Mail Online, Peter Hitchens similarly argues that the public discussion about the Germanwings crash has to start distinguishing between the questions of whether depressed people should be flying commercial planes and whether people taking antidepressants should be.

“(S)ome drugs used to treat depression may increase suicidal ideations, aggression, and violence in some patients,” writes Kroll. “Several SSRIs carry black box warnings about the potential for increased suicide risk when starting the drugs, particularly in adolescents and young adults.”

“We are not saying that people suffering from depression are a danger to anyone. They are not,” writes Hitchens. “We are saying that it may be the case that people who take some ‘antidepressant’ drugs are a danger, often to themselves and in some cases to others, because of the powerful effects these little-studied drugs, and withdrawal from them, may have on their brains.”

Germanwings Crash Raises Questions For Pilots Taking Depression Drugs (Forbes, March 29, 2015)

Nobody is ‘Stigmatising’ Depression. It’s the Pills We Need to Worry About (Mail Online, March 30, 2015)

4 COMMENTS

  1. This is getting closer to the truth, but it still relies too much upon the lying language of psychiatry. People are not a danger. The real danger is psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. Until society at large begins to see psychiatry for what it really is, we will continue to be baffled by these tragedies. Psychotropic drugs are the culprits here. Psychiatry is the guilty party. The psychopharmaceutical industrial complex and the therapeutic state must be held accountable for these catastrophies. Until then, justice will not be served.

    https://psychiatricsurvivors.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/the-crash/

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  2. The Forbes story is a bit weird, since after pointing out that the FDA recognizes suicidal and homicidal thinking as a possible “side effect” of the drugs, the author seems to back out by the end.

    The writer in the Daily Mail is much more forthright, and I am told by Cheryl Prax, a survivor activist in London, that this reporter frequently is critical of psych drugs.

    At least (I hope) we won’t have to read the usual “if only he could have received psychiatric help before this happened.” Or will we?

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    • It’s becoming more and more clear that perpetrators (co-victims?) of these tragedies were receiving plenty of “help” and it did nothing to prevent the said tragedies. So this argument starts to sound more and more false to more and more people.

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  3. Finally some more mainstream people are starting to ask the right questions. The only problem is too much of the fake “balance” where they always have to put out the standard “while these drugs help thousands of people” bs when we know they are for the most part placebos.

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