On the one hand we get very bent out of shape when the govt. or our employer wants to pry into our health and private lives, yet when something like this happens we all ask why nobody pried into this pilots health and private life. It's a tricky situation and I don't pretend to have the answers.

Germany has unbelievable privacy laws. One example: when the German government owned the only telephone company in the country (it belonged to the post office), the telephone privacy law forbade them from recording the number you dialed, on grounds that it violated the privacy of the people you called for them to do so. Phone billing was done with a mechanism that looked like an electric meter...when you punched in the phone number you wanted to speak to, the meter would read the first few digits to decide how fast to spin the meter. When you got your bill, all it said was you'd used a certain number of "telephone units."

There were two major problems: no way to contest a bill (people would occasionally get 10,000-mark phone bills) and every time you picked up the phone you had to pay, even if you were calling the house next door to yours.

It's better now.

initials of people in the news, even when the story has been corroborated and verified.

society, but one that must be addressed, as planes get ever bigger and airports get ever more congested.

that has been provoking much heated discussion on DU over the last couple of days.

The pro-privacy advocates have been duking it out with the pro-regulatory supporters.

All we do know is that Lufthansa is upgrading its
health reporting requirements as we speak.
And, I say: a damn good thing, too.

Treat your doctor and your AME ( Aviation Medical Examiner) like your wife/husband and your girlfriend/boyfriend. Never let the two meet.

I see, as if "overload" was not subjective by definition!

Not at all sure what 'subjective' means here. It may well be the translation of a German medical term.

In medical charting, even in English, "subjective" is what the patient reports. "Objective" is a clinical observation or test result. Use of this term here means that Andreas L. was reporting to his doctors that he felt overwhelmed, overloaded or severely stressed.

The term in medical usage does not imply that most people would not feel overloaded by the objective circumstances - it merely means that this is the patient's reporting of his/her experience, not any clinician's observation.

You are obviously a health professional and know that of which you speak.

The point is this guy was very ill, probably afraid to find out how ill he was, and he would have been yanked if the airline knew.

I did read somewhere that he passed an airline medical in January!!! So obviously he was not being frank then.

certainly he was already into massive cover-up mode.

First, he had incurred very substantial debt to become a pilot, and it would probably have taken him 10 years or so to get financially stable even if he were able to continue his career. Nor was this just a way to earn money - this was everything that he had loved and wanted to do since he was a teenager, his main achievement in life.

I wish I could find the article where I read this - it was also in German. He was already on heightened medical monitoring.

Anyway, I think you can understand this because of your mother, and I am VERY sorry for what you must have endured with her. The stress of realizing that he had additional problems may have just pushed him over the edge, and if his functioning was beginning to deteriorate, he may have developed paranoid beliefs about the airline being out to get him.

I think we all knew that he couldn't have been mentally normal, but this gives a little more insight. Thanks for finding and posting the article.

school in Arizona, he took a break and came back some months later to try again.

He finally managed to get his licence, but with a special "SIC" addendum, meaning he was supposed to undergo special medical monitoring.

That worked really well, didn't it?

when I was 13 I remember watching my dad and thinking, when are they gonna notice he is crazy? When he had severe breakdown a year later I thought, now they know.

which she has never acknowledged.

I remember thinking, how does he hold it all together during the time he is working

very tough on a kid but if I could see it, I wondered how others did not

or howling like a wounded animal down in the basement..

I hear you

Or sister.

Rough deal, kids dealing w mental health crises in adults. We had our own challenges too, and it's lonely and scary. Aloha.

So those who postulated a psychotic episode may be correct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_processing_abnormalities_in_schizophrenia

Or it could be a number of other causes, even if organic and not psychosomatic. Early MS can present that way. Almost any inflammatory condition in the brain, but given the history of depression, one wonders about a progressive illness.

The strongest feature of psychosis is that you don't realize it. You don't know your perceptions and thinking are distorted.

Which is why I continue to insist that safety-sensitive industries must have extra safeguards in place, i.e. mandatory mental-health monitoring and reporting.

And, thanks for that Wiki link on visual abnormalities in schizophrenia.

This takes the enabling job from epic to apocalyptic proportion.

I'll take the fifth extinction please ...

only story for the past 72 hours....as if the entire world stopped and nobody has been able to post silly cat videos or photos of their lunch. What is the obsession that CNN/FOX/MSNBC has with this story that prevents them from reporting on any the other pressing news of the day; like which shoes The Prince of Wales wore with his Little Man Suit or new compelling news about how Suri Cruise spent her Spring Break.

Seriously, just a couple of years ago TMZ was the only news outlet that reported the important news and it has been so good that they have pushed the envelope so that the major news brands now have to compete because it has really brought up the standards of journalism so significantly. Especially, in the area of exceptional news and industry correspondents who speak with immense gravitas borne of months or weeks or a few minutes on searching Wikipedia of experience. And, the exacting news anchors that repeatedly ask the same penetrating questions that all seem different because as they reoder the question: "how much can you tell us about....." becomes "What can you tell us" ....or by bloviating "It is clear that there isn't much that anyone can say at this early juncture in the investigation and you are limited in what you can say given the sensitive nature of this investigation but how much can you tell us given the early time-frame in this investigation and your sensitive relationship to it....without compromising the investigation itself"?

Really, it is just awesome that the issues of Ferguson were so quickly solved by the plane crash in Europe like the Great Depression was solved by the German attack on Europe in 1939.

It was only a month ago when a plane slid off the runway in New Jersey killing nobody....that was the day after the DOJ issued its findings of extreme racism in Ferguson by the City and Police.....and the media focused two days on the plan sliding off the runway. It wasn't coincidental.....those choices of what news is worthy and how best to manipulate the public and direct opinion to meet a political agenda are not done haphazardly.

All three crashes are probable pilot suicide/mass murder; TM470 definitely the same MO. This is going to force some changes in the airline industry. Indeed, it already has. Canada just required two crew members in the flight deck at the same time. One might suspect that this was a copycat.

Of course, the "two crew members" may not be enough. It is not clear that a person bent on murdering everyone aboard is going to be deterred by a 110 pound stewardess standing in the doorway, especially since it seems most probable that the MH370 perp deliberately depressurized the cabin, which would put a stewardess at a severe disadvantage in attempting to resolve the situation.

When they start coming every year, you have to rethink.

Lede: Who was Andreas L.? The Welt has information that the Germanwings pilot fought with depression. Medications were found. Also he is reputed to have suffered from a disturbance of vision.***

According to reporting of the New York Times and the Sunday Bild, Andreas L. was under medical care for problems with his eyes. The problems had, according to two investigators, threatened his employment as a pilot, as the NYT reports. An additional person involved in the investigation has not ruled out the possibility that the vision problems could have been psychosomatic.

*** The vision disturbances are significant, because they may have suggested an organic brain dysfunction, which is probably why he was referred for a CT scan.

I'm not sure about the rules here about paragraphs, but the article also has an interesting passage about the Alps:
Evidently Andreas L. knew the crash region well. Members of the flying club in his home town told the French paper "The Parisan" that the "passionate glider" regularly took part in flights in the vicinity of Alpes-de-Haute. "He was fascinated by the Alps, yes, even possessed", the paper quotes a member of the flying club.

because they may have suggested an organic brain dysfunction.

Normally, you can quote up to 4 §, so looks like you're OK.

and I have seen reports that Lubitz was taking antidepressants. I've also seen a couple of news reports that the problem with his eyesight was blurriness.

This may not necessarily have been psychosomatic in origin. I did some searching on the subject tonight and found that some SSRIs, tricyclics and Welbutrin have been known to cause blurred eyesight. I hope we find out what medications Lubitz was taking.

Personally, I take antidepressant medications, and I have been experiencing blurred vision. Eye exams don't show any problems other than the usual nearsightedness, etc., and new prescription glasses have not helped. It had not occurred to me to make a connection between my eyesight and the meds until I read about it tonight.

Incidentally, some antidepressants have been found to increase suicidal tendencies, particularly among children, teenagers and young adults. While Lubitz was 27, this could also have been a factor in what he did.

I am not trying to excuse him, but I hope the investigators are looking into his meds and their potential side effects.

But the fact that he was referred for a CT scan meant that they were not taking any chances.

It could have been allergies, low grade sinus or whatever - but I would think it made him very, very anxious.

http://www.dw.de/psych-meds-found-at-home-of-germanwings-co-pilot/a-18347399

Google translator when the exact same article was already available in English, but from a German source.

This site has gone into my favorites.

Yay intertubes. Google translator leads to some funny linguistic results.

Happy to help!

I do translating from French into English. Google translator is a useful tool when you have pages and pages to translate, just to get a general framework to work from.

But, you invariably have to go for major grammar, style and vocabulary overhaul.
Rule of thumb: never use the raw, unretouched text directly.

about his medical condition, monitoring and recent difficulties, or if he preferred to keep matters from them. If they had a close relationship, I'd hope they would have been a source of support or at least understanding. Also his profession as a pilot was one of advanced skills and a high level of responsibility. That's a lot of stress for a person with complex medical issues, not like he was an archivist or research technician.

Even with the unfortunate stigma of this illness many people with physical and mental conditions try to find employment that is suitable if possible, recognizing current tight job markets. This Die Welt article mentions concern over finances, yet his parents were alive at least and affluent, he didn't have a family to support and was young enough to take a less demanding position or regroup. Easy to see and comment about another and after the fact; very tragic event and highly sensitive medical topic.

and self-image were obsessively linked to piloting. He already did not have robust mental health.

When his core 'reason for being' began to look in jeopardy, he lost it. Fear, resentment and anger took him over the delusional edge into murderous psychosis.

So that all docs and pharmacies know he's an airline pilot (or engineer, bus driver, whatever).

It's fairly easy in the US to doctor shop for confidentiality, since we have such a scattered system. You don't want your employer to know about certain conditions, whether psychiatric or medical. So you go to a new doctor and give different employment information.

Wondering how Germany's system might be able to alert an employer about certain concerns.

The German health system is completely foreign to me.

But, I do know that Germany has stringent privacy laws which prohibit a doctor from disclosing even serious medical issues to an employer.

To know how integrated and linked up the system is, you could ask DUer DFW. He lives there.