Impact of German airliner tragedy

[Shikima]

Thanks for that tidbit.

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[sunlioness]

I had a military patient with a recent first break psychosis (paranoia about government conspiracies and surveillance) come to my office asking me to sign a paper saying he was safe to a fire a weapon. I did some digging curious as to why a military doc wasn't taking care of this. "They don't think he's safe to come on base". Yikes. I didn't sign it. I could just see the headlines ....

 

[OldPsychDoc]

A psychiatrist weighs in: http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...dy/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

 

[cara susanna]

I had a patient (who is a commercial driver) call me today saying that his employer had requested a letter from me saying he's not suicidal or homicidal, given his history of depression, and that it would be okay for him to continue driving his route.

Between this and the articles pointing out how such and such mass murderer "was seeing Dr So-and-so, a psychiatrist, for several months before committing fill-in-the-blank-heinous-crime!" I feel like there is an increasing public outcry for mental health professionals to predict violence and essentially act as some kind of pre-crime thought police department.

Yes, I would agree with you. There are also reports of passengers asking their pilots how they're feeling and if they're satisfied with life as they board the plane.

The news is now saying that Lubitz lied to his doctors and said he wasn't flying at the moment, so there's that.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

George does it again. http://real-psychiatry.blogspot.com/2015/04/epidemiology-and-toxicology-of-aircraft.html
(I hope I can be like him when I grow up.)

 

[lunes]

It does atleast feel like depressed white males 13-30 seem to be disproportionately likely to kill random people w/ no discernible motive compared to other populations. No idea if thats statically true, but sure does seem like it.

That's probably because there are disproportionately more depressed, white males between the ages of 13-30 than depressed males between the ages of 13-30 that belong to any other racial group.

 

[Ibid]

I had a patient (who is a commercial driver) call me today saying that his employer had requested a letter from me saying he's not suicidal or homicidal, given his history of depression, and that it would be okay for him to continue driving his route.

Between this and the articles pointing out how such and such mass murderer "was seeing Dr So-and-so, a psychiatrist, for several months before committing fill-in-the-blank-heinous-crime!" I feel like there is an increasing public outcry for mental health professionals to predict violence and essentially act as some kind of pre-crime thought police department.

Psychiatrists complaining about being asked to predict violence and act as thought police is like fish complaining about water and how watery the water is.

 

[milesed]

A little off topic-
I get a few graduating high school students every year who want to stop their meds so they can enter the military. The branches of service seem to change their criteria and then the recruiters seem to give conflicting info. These patients have a variety of reasons to be on the meds- from adhd to depression, to psychotic illnesses.

My issue is that all they would need to do is stop them and lie. No one checks into what they may have reported when signing up.

 

[Shikima]

A little off topic-
I get a few graduating high school students every year who want to stop their meds so they can enter the military. The branches of service seem to change their criteria and then the recruiters seem to give conflicting info. These patients have a variety of reasons to be on the meds- from adhd to depression, to psychotic illnesses.

My issue is that all they would need to do is stop them and lie. No one checks into what they may have reported when signing up.

The ones who really need it will have a psychotic break during boot camp - saw it a few times.

 

[whopper]

I've been in the unfortunate situation on more than one occasion where a patient asked me to write a letter saying they could drive. I told them I could not do so given that it's out of my expertise. Then the employer calls me up and tells me they will absolutely not allow the person to drive unless I write a letter saying so despite that I also tell them it's outside my expertise.

So I then fax the APA statement stating that psychiatrists aren't supposed to evaluate people for driving, and then guess what? Person gets fired or something else such as suspended cause the doctor refuses to clear them for driving.

Psychiatrists complaining about being asked to predict violence and act as thought police is like fish complaining about water and how watery the water is.

Tests for predicting future violence are out there but not within the standard of care for a general psychiatrist to use. In fact most forensic psychiatrists and psychologists I know don't even know how to use them.

The two main ones out there are the HCR-20 and the COVR. I've used the HCR-20 several times. I haven't used the COVR but know people that have. Even with these tests you're still going to be in a grey area most of the time but in a grey area where you can at least make the real claim that you used the most state-of-the-art testing out there. Even the best people in the field will state that the most thorough interviews and testing will only reduce some of the grey when making an opinion, an amount that can be measured in studies, but unfortunately rarely ever giving us the confidence and direction we would've not otherwise had from just a conventional interview.

 

[Mad Jack]

Let's see.. Given that a fully loaded A320 weighs about 62,505 kg and it was traveling at approximately 44.7387 m/s when it crashed, if I were to venture a guess I'd say that it had an impact of roughly 62,553,481 Newtons.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

Let's see.. Given that a fully loaded A320 weighs about 62,505 kg and it was traveling at approximately 44.7387 m/s when it crashed, if I were to venture a guess I'd say that it had an impact of roughly 62,553,481 Newtons.

 

[Mad Jack]

It's a legitimate coping mechanism.