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Old Sep 20, 2018, 8:00 am
  #6  
ATLawyer
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: ATL
Programs: SPG, DL
Posts: 307
Originally Posted by ethernal
if you were a pilot, would you be honest about private mental health issues? When it could mean that your career is temporarily or even permanently derailed? It's easy to be a keyboard jockey hero and say yes, you would, but it's awfully easy to say that when your livelihood is not on the line.
Pilots have extremely generous loss of license and disability insurance for precisely this reason. The system is designed to encourage reporting of all issues, be it headaches, alcoholism, mental health, or otherwise. It's actually significantly more prone to abuse (I have a headache and can't fly... here take 6 months off paid leave to recover) than it is to under-reporting. And that is exactly the type of behavior that should be encouraged--nobody wants a pilot flying when they aren't at their best, so marginal cases of illness should be encouraged to be reported, and compensation continued so that the pilot can recover.
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