Psychiatrist confession: Germanwings crash & Debian toxic culture recognized before suicides
13:30 Sun, 19 Oct 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
A few days ago, I published the blog revealing that Joerg Jaspert, who exerts significant control over key parts of Debian, appears to be an outsourced employee of German airline group Lufthansa. In other words, Lufthansa may deliberately or passively be exerting some influence over the future of Debian.
People were quick to notice something in his slides from GanetiCon 2015: the reference to the low-cost subsidiary Germanwings.
In fact, the well known crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 in France occurred on 24 March 2015 and Jaspert went to Prague for GanetiCon in September 2015, six months after the crash.
The crash investigation determined that a pilot had deliberately crashed the passenger aircraft into a French mountain, a dramatic suicide, killing himself, his crew and all the passengers along with him.
Moreover, the pilot had seen a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist had ruled that he was unfit to fly. Under the German system, the privacy of the patient is paramount and a doctor can not directly inform an employer about a diagnosis. The system relies on employees to inform their employer of each illness and take medical leave.
Therefore, Lufthansa and Germanwings could not know about the risk of a suicide but in the case of Debian suicides, we did know. The need for a psychiatrist or group therapist had been actively discussed in the period between 2006 and 2010 when the key suicides transpired, right up to the death of Adrian von Bidder on our wedding day.
There are many deaths that occur around the workplace and in voluntary activities where nobody is actually at fault.
To reach the threshold of criminal liability for an accident or suicide requires some very compelling evidence that the possibility of a catastrophe was known before the death happened and the group of people in charge failed to correct their group behaviour.
In the case of the Debian suicide cluster, even if we did not have these discussions about getting group therapy, each new death should make us think about the possibility that other victims concerned with the same influences might choose the same fate.
After the death of Jens Schmalzing and the beginning of conflict around Sven Luther, the death of his mother and his work with Frans Pop, the debian-private (leaked) gossip network discussed the possibility that we need a psychiatrist to spend a day with the group at DebConf each year.
In fact, what they are talking about is not a psychiatrist, they are talking about the need for an occupational therapist, which is a type of psychologist who specializes in the behaviour problems of groups, teams and companies.
From time to time we see one of the rude people making the comment implying some individual volunteer should see a psychiatrist. This type of thing is just another way social media addicts insult each other.
Then we see people making rude comments about "behaviour". The experts have already ruled on that: behaviour is also a function of the group and the culture where the person resides or grew up. If you say that there is a problem with somebody's behaviour, you are actually saying that the group has corrupted them in some way. Behaviour is not an absolute concept, it is a relative concept. Differences in behaviour don't arise spontaneously, they are a function of the rudeness from everybody else.
By way of example, the abstract for the paper Group Influence on Individual Behavior across Cultures tells us:
Differences among cultures with regard to the effects of group conformity pressures and influence on individual behavior have been reported in several previous studies. The current study analyzes responses of managers from thirteen different countries who participated in management training programs around the world. Results indicated that West German and Swiss managers were particularly high in conformist type response patterns while British and Austrian managers ranked lowest among the countries represented. Japanese managers revealed a complex pattern with a noticeable anti-conformist tendency-a finding that has been reported in previous research.
It is an interesting observation that Dr Norbert Preining is an Austrian in Japan.
Yet Amaya Rodrigo Sastre's comments about Debian needing a psychiatrist / occupational therapist are both brilliant and they are a smoking gun. If the group had followed Amaya's advice some suicides may have been avoided.
To put it another way, the trademark stubborness of certain leaders is akin to carrying a knife and a gun.
Subject: Total world domination through therapy and free software! Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 13:25:08 +0100 From: Amaya <amaya@debian.org> Organization: Debian - http://www.debian.org/ To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Russell Coker wrote: > True. But we can only change some things and only in some areas.
Sure, we are just humans :)
> I will always have little sympathy for someone who complains bitterly > about unfairness when by any objective metric they would be regarded > as being in the most fortunate few percent of the world's population.
Yes, as in having clean tab water. Ack.
> Do you think it might be beneficial to have some group sessions at > Deb-conf's to help us deal with these things?
I strongly believe in the group sauna effect :)
> Debian has a huge pile of money that is apparently not being spent, > booking a good psychiatrist for a day for every DebConf would not make > much of an impact on Debian finances and might have a good impact on > productivity.
s/psychiatrist/therapist/ Maybe someone that is experienced in large voluntary communities could give a talk, or workshop, or both.
It would be interesting to know wether anyone knows a person that could help us this way. I could talk to some people if the idea doesn't look stupid to the rest you the people reading this.
-- ·''`. If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution : :' : -- Emma Goldman `. `' Proudly running Debian GNU/Linux (unstable) `- www.amayita.com www.malapecora.com www.chicasduras.com
The odd thing is, during my undergraduate studies in Melbourne, I spent five years providing IT services to the fast-growing Work Solutions Group, the company founded by two of Australia's most successful and well known occupational therapists. As Amaya put it, does anybody know a person? The one person who can answer those questions is deliberately censored: this makes the overlords even more culpable.
Of those occupational therapists I do know, one of them is a life member of the industry association and she has frequently been called upon to advise the parliamentary committee process and Australia's largest corporations and insurers.
Having spent five years in an environment like that, a company that has assisted tens of thousands of workers who suffered from injury and bullying and then had somebody die on our wedding day in circumstances discussed like a suicide cluster I can't help noticing that something is wrong in the Debian world.
From the minutes of a committee meeting, Cathie tells us she has all the right people to do the job Amaya and Russell discussed in that email:
Mr BEVIS: What professions are covered by the phrase ‘occupational rehabilitation providers’? What are we talking about?
Ms Lindholm: There are many different professions employed. Largely, they are occupational therapists, physiotherapists, ergonomists and psychologists and there are some social workers.
If a sponsor pays for the therapist, does that mean the therapist is there to squeeze more blood out of unpaid volunteers for the benefit of the controlling corporations? Or should the therapist work on behalf of the individual volunteers and our best interests? Conflict of interest was discussed in the same committee meeting in 2003.
Mr BEVIS: The dilemma I have in trying to piece all this together is knowing who the client is
Ms Lindholm: That is an age old question in occupational rehab. One of the difficulties is that very often the insurer agents are purchasing the service on behalf of the authority and they believe they are the client. Most rehabilitation providers have come from professional service delivery backgrounds. When they enter the industry, very often they believe the injured worker is their client. Others come from working with an employer, and they believe the employer is their client. Our training and our support of occupational rehabilitation providers is designed very much to help them develop a system of operation where they view all those parties—and, in fact, the scheme—as their clients.
Mr BEVIS: There are a couple of very big insurers—and in some states there is a monopoly insurance arrangement. The market hold that provides is significant. That is, if you want to be involved in rehabilitation, you have to satisfy that person, corporation or agency because, at the end of the day, they are paying the bill.
Ms Lindholm: They should be happy if the job that you do creates a satisfactory conclusion for the claim. What we believe is the best satisfactory conclusion is that the person returns to work.
In open source, we see the opposite: certain overlords deliberately seek to perpetuate conflict, for example, by removing names from the list of co-authors without consent or by falsifying accusations against people.
Ms Lindholm: ... So they feel very hardly done by and they do not believe that they have had appropriate assistance and there is no scheme other than social security to pick them up.
Our argument is that we would like to have in place this safety net that Jane described. We do not want people to limp along in the system or have a failed return to work attempt organised by their employer or, as Mr Bevis said, have an employer who actually chooses not to have them back for some reason or another. Then they become disconnected; maybe they are made redundant or they no longer have a job to return to.
What we are really after is this safety net idea where a professional rehab person comes in when a person has not been able to return to work in, say, 10 days. After 10 days, it becomes a major claim in Victoria—another issue in Victoria is that the employer has responsibility for that first 10 days, so there is very little incentive for them to do anything or to get any help. If they have not returned in 10 days, we would like to have a professional rehab person meet with the worker and the employer, establish what issues both those parties have and then try to bring them together, negotiate some common ground and put together a professional, workable and agreed plan as to where to go from there, so that they have some hope of following that plan and positively managing the return to work process and the needs of the claim. Very often only one visit is required to help each party see the other’s point of view and to start to work together, but usually we do not have that opportunity.
In our voluntary open source software communities, we see statements from the overlords insisting that people who ask questions should be vilified until the day we die.
Adrian von Bidder used his blog to ask ethical questions. He died at age 32. It was the day of our wedding.
Ms Lindholm: ...
With respect to those who do not resolve, those who need further input, we can usually sort out very early on in a claim what it is that is stopping the person from going back to work. In many cases it is not their injury. People talk about slow resolution of the injury and slow resolution of the symptoms, but in our experience that is not what keeps people off work.
What is keeping people off work is, in many cases, the relationship between them and their workplace—whether it is their direct boss, their supervisor or issues that they are having at home that mean that they are not being a very good employee at that time. They have an injury, but often they have carried it for a very long time before they have finally put in the claim. In many cases, something goes wrong at work which means that they just cannot or will not put up with the pain or the discomfort that they have been managing for a long time. There is still a stigma attached to putting in the claim. Even cases that we do see, for what we could call early intervention, have often become chronic really before they are even reported. That is why it is so important for us to get them as early as we can.
So often, though, we get the claims for rehabilitation after the employer has tried to do something with them, after their claim has been denied by the agent. Many cases are denied by the agent. The worker is already feeling anxious about having to put in a claim and it really almost does not matter what their employer says to them. They will feel that their employer is going to judge them harshly, and often their peers judge them harshly. The whole scenario is set to be adversarial right from the start. If we can get in there and sort out that rubbish, we can usually help them all move forward together. Often we get the claims after the employer and the worker are fighting; they may not have spoken for a year.
I was very fortunate to spend five years hanging around with Cathie and Suzanne's team and gaining such valuable insights from their brilliance. Based on all that experience, when I look through the debian-private (leaked) messages, over 70,000 emails, I can't avoid the feeling that some of the deaths could have been avoided and people actually seem to know it.
Mark Shuttleworth, being CEO of Canonical, was personally involved as a Debian Developer from the beginning so he has personally been a witness to these discussions. It is an awkward coincidence that when the veil of secrecy was broken and the community started to discuss the suicides in public, Shuttleworth removed himself from the Debian Developer status, presumably removing him from the debian-private mailing list.
Even without reading academic papers or paying for advice from an occupational therapist, I feel that some points have been raised and ignored over and over again. Some of the points that are really obvious:
- Asking most developers to share rooms with strangers while a small group of people always get to bring their spouse to conferences.
- A Debian Social Contract that promises transparency while keeping over 80,000 messages hidden in the debian-private (leaked) gossip network.
- A promise of public recognition while periodically picking people out for shaming.
- Pretending there is no money while some people are obviously getting paid.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █