The Germanwings air catastrophe is now being widely reported as a murder-suicide, based on audio evidence that paints the picture of a co-pilot locking everyone else out of the flight deck while he calmly flew the plane onto a collision course with a mountain.
Our hearts and prayers go out to all those lost in this horrible tragedy, yet we must also ask: Could this have been prevented? Was it caused by mind-altering prescription medications?
UPDATE: It is now confirmed that Andreas Lubitz was taking psychiatric medications. He underwent 18 months of “psychiatric treatment” and mind-altering medications have now been found in his home by law enforcement authorities. Click here for full details.
The Mirror (UK) is now reporting that “Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz ‘suffered burnout or depression’ a few years ago, a former classmate has claimed.”
The reported behavior of Andrea Lubitz is eerily similar to SSRI-drug-induced school shooters who carried out mass murders in the United States (see detailed list below). In case after case, school shooters have been found to either be on prescription antidepressant drugs or recently taken off them, causing withdrawal side effects.
What U.S. school shootings and the Germanwings mass murder have in common is a dissociation from reality where individuals often think they are “playing a video game” and don’t realize their actions are literally harming other people in the real world.
As the Mirror reports:
The mother of an ex-classmate of Lubitz told how the co-pilot – who deliberately flew the passenger jet into the Alps killing 150 people – had confided in her daughter a few years ago.
She said: “He apparently was suffering from burnout or depression.”
These days, almost everyone who is described as suffering from “depression” is on mind-altering prescription medications which are marketed in a deceptive way that glosses over the murder-suicide risks associated with such drugs. Antidepressants literally alter brain chemistry and cause people to think and act in ways they would not normally exhibit.
It’s not unusual for pilots to fly planes into terrain in flight simulators
Here’s something else most non-pilots don’t realize. Although it’s not a condoned practice, all of us who are trained to operate aircraft have trained at one time or another in flight simulators. And all of us — including myself — have done things in those flight simulators that we would never do in real life. I’ve performed loops and barrel rolls with a Cessna, for example, even though I would never be crazy enough to try such a thing in a real airplane.
Attempting these maneuvers in a simulator has legitimate training value that saves lives in the real world, because these “games” help pilots learn the limits of aircraft power, stability and maneuverability. To know the limits of an aircraft, it’s useful to exceed those limits in the safety of a simulator where you DON’T die…
At the same time, I’ve also seen other pilots in simulators intentionally fly aircraft into mountains as a way to end the current scenario with a surge of excitement. Again, this is undoubtedly frowned upon in the commercial aviation industry, but I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes. I’ve never done this myself, it turns out, but plenty of other pilots have.
In a simulator, of course, it’s perfectly safe to fly your airplane into a mountain. What if Lubitz thought he was in a flight simulator? Could antidepressant drugs have caused him to confuse reality vs. simulation? It’s speculation, of course, but it’s consistent with other SSRI-related mass murders we’ve seen over the years.
FAA bans pilots from flying while on antidepressant drugs
Antidepressant drugs are so dangerous that the FAA bans U.S. pilots from taking them. They are considered a danger to the pilot and passengers. I’m not certain whether antidepressants are illegal for pilots to consume in various European countries, but it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to be acquiring them and taking them covertly, even if it were illegal.
Here’s a list of other mass murderers who were taking antidepressant drugs:
Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.
• Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.
• Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.
• Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.
• Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.
• Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.
• Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.
• Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.
• A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.
• Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..
• A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.
• Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.
• TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.
• Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.
• James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.
• Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania
• Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California
• Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.
• Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.
• Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.
• Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.
• Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.
• Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.
• Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.
• Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.
• Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”)
• Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002, (Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)
• Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.
• Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.
• Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.
• Woody __, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.
• A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.
• Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”
• Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.
• Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.
• Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.
• Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.
• Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/germ…
