What Causes the Seemingly Stable to Have Sudden Mental Breakdowns?

After Jet Blue: What Causes the Seemingly Stable to Have Sudden Mental Breakdowns?

04/08/2012

Sudden psychotic episodes or what used to be called nervous breakdowns, don’t usually make the news, but they do when the victim is currently flying a commercial airline like the case of a recent Jet Blue pilot who had to be subdued.

The Jet Blue pilot began acting erratically on his flight headed from New York to Las Vegas, forcing the co-pilot to lock him out of the cockpit and make an emergency landing. It leaves many wondering what causes people to lose it? WSJ Health Blogexplored this fascinating subject. 

One passenger on the plane said that “I don’t think when the pilot woke up that this was what he was intending to do, but unfortunately it happened to him.”

A psychotic episode is when you lose touch with reality for whatever period of time the episode occurs. It can be caused by a brain tumor, thyroid condition, fever, infection, drug use, or a bad reaction to a prescription drug. It can also be caused by a bipolar disorder and extreme depression, especially when there’s major stress on top of mental illness.

There are usually warning signs, however, even if they are only noticed after the fact. “When people present a kind of rapid onset of a psychotic state that hasn’t been noticed before and that seems to come out of the blue, in retrospect there is usually some clinical prodrome,” or early symptom, David Hellerstein, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, tells the Health Blog.

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