Even a careful psychiatric examination of the co-pilot involved in last week's Germanwings jetliner crash probably would not have revealed whether he intended to kill himself, researchers say.
"As a field, we're not very good at accurately predicting who is at risk for suicidal behavior," says Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard. He says studies show that mental health professionals "perform no better than chance" when it comes to predicting which patients will attempt suicide.
Nock made the comments after German authorities said that the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had once received treatment for suicidal tendencies. Lubitz is suspected of deliberately crashing the Germanwings plane into the French Alps, killing 150 people onboard.
Most of what scientists know about suicide comes from studies of the general population, not pilots, says Guohau Li, who directs the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia University. Only one or two pilots a year kill themselves by crashing an airplane, he says, and they are nearly always general aviation pilots flying alone.
[For more of this story, written by Jon Hamilton, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...cide-specialists-say]
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