If you end up becoming a pilot for a major airline, it's probably a job you've wanted to do since you were pretty young. It requires more than 1,500 hours of flight time passing tests, and it's an investment. The training can cost more than $100,000. And once you have the job, it's a heavy load, both the responsibility you have at work and all the time on the road, which can cause stress at home.

But there are rigid rules for how you can take care of your mental health and deal with emotional stress when you're a pilot.

Want to take antidepressants? You're limited to a small list of approved

medications, and you're looking at long delays while the paperwork and your fitness to fly

gets reviewed by the Federal Aviation Administration. And if you're not on medication,

but diagnosed with an issue, say anxiety or depression, that opens up a pathway

to bureaucratic scrutiny, which can also result in having to take time off work.

I get why the system is cautious. When you're an airline pilot, you are responsible for the public's

safety. You might remember a horrific crash from 2015, a pilot who had

been treated for depression and was deemed fit to fly by the FAA, deliberately crashed a German

wing's passenger jet into the French Alps, killing everyone on board. That tragedy made the public hyper aware of the stakes involved. It's what

the industry points to as to why the rules need to be rigid. Then in 2023, there was another

disturbing story that hit the headlines. A pilot named Joseph Emerson experienced a psychotic break and actually tried to crash a passenger plane mid-flight.

He wasn't the pilot flying the plane, but he had been in the cockpit.

And thankfully no one was hurt.

But he later revealed his psychosis was likely triggered by mushrooms he'd taken days earlier.

He also admitted he'd been self-medicating his

depression with drugs and alcohol. He didn't want to go on an antidepressant like his wife had

urged him to because he was afraid to lose his job. Immerson's case sparked a renewed debate

around the standards for mental health in aviation. Were strict rules

keeping passengers safe or pushing pilots suffering with mental health issues further underground?

Within the past year, some changes have been made by the FAA. There are a few more psychiatric

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