The difference between suicide and homicide

AS THE Germanwings plane crash filled us all with horror, hearing that the co-pilot deliberately flew the plane into the side of a mountain doubled that horror.

It rendered us speechless. It did not, however, stop newspapers from running screamy headlines: words like ‘madman’, ‘suicide’ and ‘depression’ were hurled onto the front page with little thought for their impact. Once again, it was not the actions of a lone homicidal individual held up for scrutiny, but the actions of a mass condition, a common illness. A mental illness.

First, we read of the co-pilot’s ‘suicide’. But this man did not commit suicide — he committed mass homicide. Suicide is when you end only one life — your own. Just one person dies. Taking a plane load of strangers with you is something else entirely.

Murdering 150 people who are in your care is not about ‘depression’. I have no idea what caused this man to do what he did — none of us do, and probably never will — but I do know what depression is. Many of us know what depression is — one in four Irish women seek treatment for it, and one in ten Irish men. It’s not that Irish men suffer less from depression than Irish women, it’s just that they present for treatment less and kill themselves more.

So howling headlines about this ‘depressed’ ‘madman’ in the cockpit did those of us living with depression no favours at all. Like millions of others — 9.7% of British people, 7% of Americans, I have long term low level depression.

Like a cold, it pops up a couple of times a year — it bears little relation to my external life, which is lovely, but is a chemical imbalance inside my brain. I manage it with exercise and a daily anti-depressant pill. Like if I had diabetes, I would manage it with insulin, or if I had asthma, I would use an inhaler. The only difference is the organ affected is in my head, not my torso.

At no point in my forty something years have I ever considered causing mass carnage because of my depression. I look after it, and it leaves me alone. Were I to stop treating it, I would become lethargic and numb, and find ordinary tasks a massive effort.

Untreated, it’s a really serious illness — my ex husband died from it. His suicide was shocking and awful, but confined entirely to himself. This is what suicide is — the killing of self. Not others.

This is why a bomber who dies while killing other people is a mass murderer, and a pilot who dies while killing other people is a mass murderer. There’s a rather huge difference between the everyday tragedy of suicide and the freakish horror of what that pilot did.

People with depression tend not to be mass murderers — they have enough trouble trying to get out of bed in the morning.

So please. Can we be a little more measured, a little more thoughtful, a little less gung-ho in our misplaced flinging of diagnostics?

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