One in eight airline pilots may be clinically depressed

Hundreds of commercial airline pilots worldwide may be flying with untreated depression because they fear being grounded or losing their jobs, a new survey suggests. The anonymous survey of about 1,850 pilots from more than 50 countries found that 14% of pilots who had worked within the past week had symptoms of depression. Four percent of pilots reported having suicidal thoughts within the past two weeks. The survey offers one of the first snapshots of mental health among commercial pilots, who often don’t disclose this type of illness to airline officials or aviation regulators because they fear negative career repercussions, said senior study author Joseph Allen, a public health researcher at Harvard University in Boston. “It’s understandable that pilots are reluctant to fully disclose mental health issues because of the potential that they will be grounded or declared not fit for duty,” Allen said. With roughly 140,000 active pilots flying more than 3b people worldwide each year, the survey results should put the airline industry on notice that many pilots need better access to mental health screening and treatment, Allen added. The new findings come a year and a half after a Germanwings co-pilot who suffered from depression deliberately crashed a plane into the French Alps, killing 150 people. To get a better picture of mental health among airline pilots, researchers conducted an anonymous online survey between April and December of 2015. Questions touched on a range of topics related to work and health in addition to depression. Out of nearly 3,500 pilots who participated in the survey, 1,848 completed the questions about mental health. Within this group, 233 (12.6%) met the criteria for likely depression and 75 (4.1%) reported having suicidal thoughts within the previous two weeks.<br/>