We know about gun crime. What about airplane crime?
Who broke Audrey Hale's brain?
In March of last year, Audrey Hale entered the hall of infamy when she shot and killed six people in her former elementary school. Now, a year and a half later, the journal she wrote prior to the shootings has been released to the public.
Anyone looking for clues as to why Hale, who was 28 at the time, committed such terrible deeds, will be disappointed with the pages of ramblings which include her distress at having been born female, her misery due to having a “broken brain,” and her belief that by dying she would achieve happiness. The journal has been released despite the FBI Behavioral Threat Assessment Center recommending to Nashville police that any documentation that could encourage copycat shootings be suppressed. However, Hale’s mental health records, which many believe could provide evidence for her mental deterioration and the effects of the psychiatric drugs she took, are still being withheld and may never be released to the public.
This is fully in line with government policy following many other school shootings. Investigative journalists attempting to access the medical records of shooters have come up against a brick wall. With regard to Hale, it is known that she was “treated” for mental health issues for 20 of her 28 years of life, at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and that she was diagnosed with at least five mental illnesses. Prior to the shootings, she was taking a number of drugs, including a benzodiazepine (lorazepam) and two antidepressants (Lexapro and Prozac). Both Lexapro and Prozac are SSRI drugs which have long been associated with suicidal and homicidal ideation and behavior in a subset of users. How they affected Hale may never be known.
Who runs the US — Congress or Big Pharma?
Over the past few decades, ever since the severe adverse effects of SSRI and SNRI drugs in particular came to light, many have called for them to be withdrawn and for lawmakers to reconsider governmental funding being poured into “mental health services” by the hundreds of billions of dollars. It is possible that, were Congress to be presented with clear evidence of a link between antidepressants and school shootings, the legislative body would take action.
Then again, it is just as possible if not more that Congress would bow to the Pharma lobby and do nothing of the kind.
Could have been even worse
But Hale killed only 6 people (if murder can ever be associated with the word “only”). The worst school shooting in history, at Columbine High School, left 21 people dead and inspired Hale to write in her journal, “I want my massacre to end in a way that Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] would be proud of.” Thankfully she did not achieve that macabre goal.
But there are more deadly weapons than guns. What about airplanes?
83 people on a different kind of trip
In October, 2023, Joseph Emerson, then a pilot working for Alaska Airlines, reached up above his head in an airplane cockpit and pulled down two red levers. 83 people were incredibly blessed in that the levers didn’t achieve their intended purpose — shutting down both of the aircraft’s engines. The plane was then 30,000 feet above ground.
Emerson is currently undergoing therapy and publicizing his story in the hope that it will help other pilots struggling with emotional issues. Prior to the incident, he had been struggling himself, trying to deal with the death of one of his closest friends who had passed away some years beforehand. A few days before the fateful flight, he went away for the weekend with a few friends to commemorate the friend and the group decided to take psychedelic mushrooms.
The psychedelic effects of magic mushrooms (psilocybin) usually last only a few hours. In some people, however (and no one can predict who), the drug’s hallucinatory effects can last days. Emerson was one of those people.
He went home after the weekend trip still feeling somewhat unlike himself. A few days later he was in the airplane’s cockpit, confused and distressed, as he told ABC News:
There was a feeling of being trapped, like, “Am I trapped in this airplane and now I'll never go home?” ... I became completely convinced that none of this was real.
I was like, this isn't real. I need to wake up.
You choose: Magic mushrooms or a magic touch
How does a person “wake up” from a psychedelic trip? There are no built-in emergency exits, as Emerson was to discover. He recalled:
There are two red handles in front of my face. I was thinking that I was going to wake up, thinking this is my way to get out of this non-real reality, so I reached up and I grabbed them, and I pulled the levers.
There were two other pilots in the cockpit. They grabbed his hands and pulled them away from the levers. Only then did he start to emerge from his hallucinatory state.
It was really the pilot's physical touch on my hand. Both pilots grabbed my hands where I kind of stopped and I had that moment, which I'll just say I view this moment as a gift.
Emerson got up and left the cockpit, sitting down on a jump-seat in the body of the aircraft. But the story wasn’t over yet — he still hadn’t completely recovered.
At some point I thought maybe this isn't real, and maybe I can wake myself up by just jumping out [of the plane], like that freefall feeling that you have.
Again he grabbed a lever, this time the one that operates the cabin door. And again it was the physical touch, this time of the flight attendant, that stopped him and brought him back to reality, if not completely:
She put … her hand on mine again and with that human touch, I released. I think around that period is when I said, “I don't understand what's real, I don't understand what's real.”
By then, Emerson had recovered enough to recognize that he couldn’t trust himself to act responsibly, and he asked to be handcuffed.
Get help, get grounded
Emerson later related that it was only four days after taking the mushrooms that he regained full clarity and could begin to comprehend what had occurred. By then he was in jail, where he remained for 45 days before being granted bond. He was originally charged with attempted murder (on 83 counts), but the charges were eventually dropped, although he still faces charges of reckless endangerment.
While in jail, a doctor told him that he had been suffering from “hallucinogen persisting perception disorder” which can cause first-time users of psilocybin to experience ongoing hallucinations and perception issues for days rather than the usual hours. What this pseudo-diagnosis really means is that no one can predict how a person will respond to psychedelic drugs, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
But Emerson had been in emotional turmoil prior to the fateful flight. Why didn’t he reach out for genuine help?
Right now, if you raise your hand, not in every case, but there’s a perception out there that if you raise your hand and say something’s not right, there's a very real possibility that you don’t fly again.
What Emerson is referring to is the chance that revealing his issues would have categorized him as a flight risk. Ironically, that is precisely what he was. And he had sought out help, from a therapist who suggested he see a doctor and ask for a prescription for an antidepressant.
He decided against it, due to his fears that it would end his career. He knew that he wasn’t the only pilot to make that decision in similar circumstances. But the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) denies that a significant number of pilots are grounded due to seeking out mental health care. In a statement to ABC News, the FAA said:
The FAA encourages pilots to seek help if they have a mental-health condition since most, if treated, do not disqualify someone from flying. In fact, only about 0.1% of medical certificate applicants who disclose health issues are denied.
And who would you rather fly with?
Following Emerson’s near-miss, the FAA convened the Mental Health & Aviation Medical Clearances Aviation Rulemaking Committee, ARC. ARC recommended that “the FAA continually evaluate its standards and procedures against the latest research.” At a National Transportation Safety Board mental health summit in December, Dr. Brent Blue, a senior FAA medical examiner, commented:
Who would you rather fly with: a pilot who is depressed, or a pilot who is depressed on medication?
And that's what it comes down to. We need to work together to help modernize the system and help the FAA modernize our pilot mental health evaluation program.
And that’s what happened. In May of this year, the FAA expanded the number of drugs approved for use by pilots, including several antidepressants. The agency also reported that it is hiring more mental health professionals. In its statement to ABC, the FAA noted that,
Treating these conditions early is important, and that is why the FAA has approved more antidepressants for use by pilots and air traffic controllers.
Flying you safely 'home'
These changes were enshrined in law earlier this year when President Biden signed H.R. 3935, the “FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024,” which was billed as a step toward modernizing the airline industry’s approach to mental health and other safety issues.
The Act includes an order to the FAA working group to “evaluate whether medications used to treat such disorders [in the areas of psychiatry, neurology, cardiology, or internal medicine] may be safely prescribed to airmen.” Meanwhile, several antidepressant drugs have already been approved for pilots, including Cymbalta, Pristiq, and Effexor, all SNRI drugs which, like SSRI antidepressants, are known to have “suicidal thoughts and behavior” and “mania” among their side-effects.
Where was the evaluation? In all the 1068 pages of the FAA Act, there is not a single mention of the possible implications when pilots experiencing such symptoms hold the lives of dozens or hundreds in their hands. (Nor is there any mention of the growing number of clinical studies showing that antidepressant drugs work no better than placebos, giving the lie to Dr. Blue's words when he presented the choice as one between depression and depression plus antidepressants.)
Such a thing could never happen, right?
A study of FAERS, the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System, reveals that there are over 100,000 medical reports for Cymbalta, Pristiq, and Effexor. 87 percent of these reports feature problematic adverse events such as confusion, aggression, and hallucinations. There are also over 10,000 reports featuring suicide-related incidents and 939 completed suicides. And, like VAERS, the government's vaccine reporting system, it is estimated that FAERS data capture only around 10 percent of actual adverse drug events.
Emerson took magic mushrooms while not under medical supervision, however. Is there really a danger that a pilot being professionally treated for depression using FDA-approved drugs could do something similar?
In 2015, 150 people died when Andreas Lubitz, a pilot working for Germanwings, deliberately crashed an airplane into the French Alps.
It is known that he was taking medication for a psychiatric condition at the time of the crash, and that he hid this information from his superiors. Lubitz was taking citalopram (Celexa), an SSRI antidepressant, as well as another antidepressant, mirtazapine (Remeron).
The report into the crash revealed that,
On the day of the accident, the pilot was still suffering from a psychiatric disorder, which was possibly a psychotic depressive episode, and was taking psychotropic medication.
This made him unfit to fly.
A German criminal investigation concluded that Lubitz bore “sole responsibility” for what occurred.
