In Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple continues his criticism of Andreas Lubitz as being primarily a person of bad character and not one suffering from mental illness. He admits that one’s upbringing, social circumstances and the surrounding culture can all play a role in producing this character, but then…

It is said, however, that by the age of forty every man has the face that he deserves. The same might be said of a man’s character, only earlier in his life. It is part of the mystery and glory (perhaps also of the misery) of human existence, that our character is in part self-created: not entirely, but not negligibly, either. We are dealt a hand of cards, no doubt, but we do not have to play them in a pre-determined order. No determinist, however firm his philosophical belief, can live as if determinism were true: therefore he can never believe what he believes, or tells himself that he believes.

He concludes with a declaration of the limits of his former occupation:

Psychiatry will never make the likes of Andreas Lubitz whole (if he was as I surmise he was), and of this, in a way, I am glad: for it means that the powers of psychiatry will remain limited. We shall never be putty in technicians’ hands. That is not the same as saying that he should have been allowed to fly aircraft. A little more stigma and prejudice would have saved the 149 lives he so egotistically snuffed out.