The problem pilots face as pointed out by OP is that pilots facing minor depression who seek treatment face massive repercussions to their career/income, potentially completely losing their career, so instead of treating minor mental health issues they go un-treated (or self medicated) until they're massive mental health issues.
Well, no. People commit murder all the time despite being in sound mental being. You could argue that to commit murder requires you to have mental health issues, but that's not always true.
But in this scenario and many others there are strong distinctions between people who commit suicide, people who commit murder-suicide and people who commit mass murder-suicide. Understanding that distinction is important because one is a risk to themselves only and another is a risk to others around them.
The flaw is of course we bucket all of them the same way for pilots, which leads to the last two stewing and hiding.
The degrees of accepted violence is cultural. Plenty of people kill out of anger but anger does not make one insane. Unless you defined criminal behavior as mental illness.
Also I believe you're misunderstanding what was said, people as a whole, as in humanity, commit all kinds of atrocities. Mental illness is not required to be cruel or callous.
Is every soldier mentally ill simply because they are capable of killing on command?
> A pilot's access to a plane feels relevant to suicide (because it's an obvious way to kill yourself) but there's lots of ways to kill yourself that don't involve mass murder: a pilot is able to put a bullet in their head
You've given me a shitty idea that might work some of the time: We give every airline pilot a pistol. This way if they ever feel the urge to kill themselves they can do it in a hotel room instead of with the airplane. It ensures that the most convenient way for a pilot to die isn't crashing their plane. It will probably slightly increase the number of pilots who kill themselves, but decrease the number who do it by crashing their plane.
In the abstract that's right, but pilot suicide is a well-documented cause of some fatal passenger plane crashes. I doubt the impetus is unique to pilots, but the means is.