For The New York Times, Abelin-Bevier Fellow Helen Ouyang examines how the Federal Aviation Administration’s stringent requirements concerning mental health treatment puts pressure on pilots to not seek treatment. Ouyang interviewed several pilots who either knew of colleagues who had hidden medical conditions from the FAA or who admitted to hiding conditions themselves for fear of being grounded.
Refusing to disclose mental health problems or receive treatment can have dangerous consequences. In 2023, Joseph Emerson, a captain with Alaska Airlines, suffered a mental health episode while in the cockpit of a flight and shut off the plane’s fuel lines. He had sought therapy for years prior to the incident but had always refused any medications because he was afraid of losing his job. Ouyang writes:
His case was a wake-up call for the industry. Renewed scrutiny was directed at the F.A.A.’s medical-certification process, and the National Transportation Safety Board was prompted to convene a mental-health safety summit. “Because a pilot’s work is safety-sensitive, they are held to a higher standard,” Susan Northrup, the F.A.A.’s flight surgeon since 2021, told me in an email. Her duty is to safeguard the broader flying public, she added, which supersedes the needs of individual pilots. The worry, though, is that the F.A.A. has inadvertently created a mental-health process so burdensome and restrictive that it deters pilots like Emerson from being honest with authorities and seeking help when they need it. [Jennifer] Homendy, the N.T.S.B. chair, told me that a system that drives pilots to hide any symptoms of mental illness is “a detriment to safety.”