It doesn't take a depression therapist to see:
Depression doesn't cause plane wrecks. You don't need to be a depression therapist to know that. More precisely, depression doesn't cause people to fly airplanes into the side of mountains. Even if you haven't particularly stopped to think about this, I challenge you to slow down for a moment and not admit that as a reasonable person who's taken a moment to think it through you do not terribly clearly know this.
CNN knows this, too, as does every other media outlet who's been covering the story of Germanwings flight 9525 that crashed into a mountain in France on March 24th, 2015 near Digne-les-Bains, killing all on board.
There has been speculation, as you know, that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot who appears to have been flying the plane at the time it went down was depressed, and at least a strong implication that that depression "caused" him to intentionally fly the plane into the mountain.
The counterpoint that's emerged has taken one of two tracks. The most common has been to cite statistics on aggressive behavior among those considered depressed versus those who are not (there is no statistical significance for depression alone as an indicator of violence). The second is to speculate that it was not depression but some other mental disorder.
The medical model overwhelms our understanding of depression
I'm concerned both arguments miss the broader point. We seem to have a misunderstanding in the most fundamental sense of what we mean when we invoke a mental condition like depression. We are attached to the idea of "mental disorders" as following the same terms of understanding of medical diseases. This approach, called (accurately, borrowing from medicine proper) is called either the disease model or the medical model. Such a process follows a consistent pattern: An ailment is identified, a clinician uses diagnostic tools (a stethoscope, an MRI machine, an anecdotal interview with the patient), compares the results with an existing body of knowledge about physiology and disease, issues a diagnosis and prescribes a course of treatment based on the prevailing standard of treatment in the field for said disease or disorder.
It's a process that works very well in most cases of medical ailment. It even works okay, some of the time, when it comes to mental distress. But even when it does, it is still predicated on a fuzzy, questionable understanding (misunderstanding, really) of the difference between an experience of depression versus an experience of, say, a kidney infection.
Depression is real. Depression is real. Depression is real.
But that doesn't mean depression is real on the same terms as a kidney infection. It's not less real, it's just real in a different, ontological sense than infections are real. Our best diagnostic tools can't "see" depression. When following the medical model to diagnose depression and part of the treatment of depression (or to research depression, perhaps) our best data are qualitative--we can make subjective interpretations of affect (the way mood presents itself) and we can translate the anecdotal reports from a patient into data and we may well arrive at what would be considered a "valid" diagnosis of depression. Smart people have gathered together and decided what sorts of data we want to define as "depression".
In some regards this works very well, but we are too prone to forgetting that a diagnosis of depression is fundamentally and critically different from a diagnosis of some other sort of disease.
People are depressed for all sorts of reasons and have a remarkable breadth of options for how they might respond to that depression. A kidney infection is likely to follow a predictable sort of process of pathology (or recovery, in response to certain interventions). We might accurately predict that, left untreated, a kidney infection is likely to cause a particular sort of pain, or that the infection will spread an a roughly predictable timeline. Because we can identify a narrow set of causes of kidney infections, we can locate the bacteria, at a particular scale, in a particular part of an organ in the body. Depression just simply isn't that kind of thing.
And no, that's not because we don't have a powerful enough microscope
There is a prevailing sentiment in corners of psychology that suggest that it's only a matter of time before we're able to identify the cause (the disease process) for depression just as we can for kidney infections. Nonsenses. Utter nonsense. I don't lack faith that technology will allow us to see and the inner working of the smallest crevices of our minds and we have already been able to see differences in brain activity from those who are considered depressed versus those who are not. But depression isn't simply a physiological phenomenon. It is a synthesis of experiences: relational, cultural, spiritual, emotional. It leaves an imprint on our minds, on a daily experience of sadness, but also manifests itself in our connects (or lack of connections) with other people. Depression is more than affective. And it is also an experience that grows out of so many other experiences (grief, shame, betrayal).
People make choices. Depressed people make choices
There's no inoffensive argument that can be made that suggests that someone experiencing serious depression can't make choices. Are some choices harder than others? Sure. But anyone who's struggled with depression would lawfully balk at the suggestion that their experience of depression could ever manifest itself in a decision to kill an airplane full of people.
So here's what we're afraid to say: Andreas Lubitz, if the accounting of him as having made a willful decision to murder 150 people is accurate, is a bad man who did a bad thing. Is it worthwhile to attempt to understand the source of that evil and work to prevent other such acts of evil from happening in the future? You bet. Looking for answers in a diagnosis of depression, however, isn't going to get us anywhere.
