Re: “Commentary: Depression is as real a disease as diabetes – and staggeringly common”:

The April 4 Tribune News Service op-ed by Professor Robert M. Sapolsky, on the depression of the Germanwings co-pilot who deliberately crashed a commercial airliner into a mountain, was neither convincing nor reassuring.

The point of his column was contained in its print sub-headline: “The act of one pilot will hopefully not cause sufferers of depression to hide or deny their disease.” Who could disagree? And we certainly hope it will prompt more treatment.

But how about a bit more balance? How about “the act of one murderous pilot will hopefully prompt measures to prevent mentally ill individuals from flying commercial planes”?

Or how about not allowing the right to privacy of the mentally ill to trump the right of the public to be safe when they’re 35,000 feet off the ground? Or not relying solely on self-reporting by the mentally ill that they are in crisis?

Or hoping mental health professionals will step forward and alert authorities when they recognize an individual in crisis is shopping for a clinician, any clinician, to provide a needed clean bill of health so they may fly – whether fit to do so or not?

I read Professor Sapolsky’s op-ed several times. I found nothing that suggested how the public might be better protected in the future from the admittedly rare, but still real, homicidal tendencies of certain individuals suffering from severe depression.