The UK gutter press should produce more careful and considered responses to such tragic eventsWikimedia

The crash of Germanwings flight 9525 last week was a horrific tragedy. The revelation that the pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately locked his co-pilot out of the cabin and crashed the plane into the side of the mountain makes the event even more incomprehensible and unspeakable.

You would think that after the News of the World phone-hacking scandal created such an aura of amorality around it, the UK gutter press would produce more careful and considered responses to such tragic events. However, as soon as reports of Lubitz’s depression emerged, tabloid headlines screamed out in sensationalist insensitivity, suggesting that if you’re depressed, there’s a fair chance that you’re a murderous psychopath. ‘MADMAN IN COCKPIT’ screeched the Sun; ‘Suicide pilot had a long history of depression: WHY ON EARTH WAS HE ALLOWED TO FLY?’ squealed the Daily Mail; ‘KILLER PILOT SUFFERED FROM DEPRESSION’, shrieked the same paper again.

This is not the first time such vile excuses for newspapers have egregiously stigmatised people with mental health issues. For example, in 2003 the former boxer Frank Bruno – who suffers from bipolar disorder – was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The Sun (then edited by one Rebekah Brooks) issued an edition emblazoned with the front page headline ‘BONKERS BRUNO LOCKED UP’, for an article describing him as a ‘nut’.

As many as one in 20 people are on the bipolar spectrum, and sufferers from the condition are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. That’s why the last thing a person with bipolar disorder – or indeed any mental health problem – needs is a media discourse that denounces them as crazy.

These papers suggest a link between mental illness and senseless killing – a connection brilliantly torn apart by the Venn diagram that went viral on Twitter, illustrating that the large number of people who have depression are just as unlikely to commit murder as the rest of society.

The logic of these articles is that people with depression or any other mental health problem shouldn’t do jobs in which they could easily cause the death of others as well as themselves. Considering that one in four of the UK population will suffer from a diagnosable mental health issue over the course of their life, numerous professions such as medicine, the police and fire-fighting – as well as the aviation industry – would be decimated if that were to happen.

Indeed, as the mental health charity Mind reminded us, inevitably "there will have been pilots with experiences of depression who have flown safely for decade". Many of them will have kept silent, too burdened by the stigma to open themselves up to the help they need. This only exacerbates things, and consequently it is urgently necessary that the millions of people around the world who suffer from mental health issues are told that they are not alone, that they have no reason whatsoever to feel the slightest bit ashamed, and that help is there to make things better.

When people are suffering from mental health conditions such as depression, the stigma that makes them too afraid to speak out is often a dangerous downward spiral. Contrary to the impression created by our tabloid press, there are many amongst the 350 million people worldwide suffering from the heinous illness of depression who would consider taking no lives but their own. About 90 per cent of people who take their own lives have an underlying mental health condition – most commonly depression.

Consequently, we should be enormously grateful for those who have recently spoken out and debunked the myth that sufferers from depression naturally pose a threat to the lives of others – as well as hammering home the broader point that people should harbour no feelings of guilt or self-recrimination because they are depressed. Matt Haig’s piece in the Guardian and Sally Brampton’s article in the Independent are shining examples.

About a year and half ago, I had anxiety and depression. Luckily, when I intermitted and took some time to recover, my family, friends and my college, Corpus, were enormously supportive of me. Thanks to them and the professional help I received, the states of mind that I had then now seem almost incomprehensible to me. They are impossible to adequately express – the best I can do is to say that depression made me feel like, if someone put a million pounds in front of me and told me to take it, I wouldn’t care: I’d be too trapped in my own benumbed, lifeless senses of emptiness and dread to feel the remotest notion of hope or excitement in that or anything. And I’m not sure if I would wish that on Adolf Hitler.

But the crucial thing is to emphatically underline the fact that I, like the 350 million people affected by depression worldwide, would never have countenanced harming anybody else at all because of those horrifying depressed feelings. The last thing needed by the multitudes of people across the globe with mental health conditions of any variety is for the stigma to get worse because of the inaccurate insinuations of the tabloid press.