No one as yet knows for sure, but the anecdotal information, so far, is that Stephen Fray was a troubled young man, probably suffering from depression.

If that is indeed the case, Stephen Fray may not be singular; not too different from many Jamaican young men - or Jamaicans generally - who have deep illnesses that go undiagnosed and untreated. He stands out only because of the extreme action he took at the start of this week.

On Sunday night, this seemingly clean-cut 21-year-old, with a solid middle-class background and decent education, barged, gun in hand, past security check points at Montego Bay's Sangster International Airport and on to a CanJet aeroplane preparing for departure and Cuba. He held nearly 160 passengers hostage, and made seemingly incoherent demands to be flown out of Jamaica.

The incident ended without anyone being injured or killed. But it could easily have been otherwise.

The post-crisis focus, so far, has understandably been on the breach of security at the Sangster airport, and how it can be prevented in the future.

Another question

But for Stephen Fray's friends and family, there is another question: what would have possessed this young man who, in the context of Jamaica, might be consider privileged, to do so such a thing? It is a question that is worth the while of the society as a whole to ponder, and to which it is in the interest of all of us to have answers.

Indeed, Stephen Fray's friends speak, in retrospect, of his transformation over the past year, and especially in the past three months, from a sociable young man to an introvert, who posted hints of a dark metamorphosis on the social networking website, Facebook.

Whatever troubled him went undetected. Or, perhaps those who noticed felt that it would, in time, go away; that he would get over it.

Which, too often, is what is claimed about people with psychiatric or emotional problems: they will get over it. And, if they don't, they are perceived as weak and fickle, to be shunned or hidden away. In this flippancy, mental illness is not deemed to be a real illness.

Yet, far more Jamaicans may be depressed, or suffer from other forms of psychological or psychiatric trauma and in need of professional intervention than we care to admit. For instance, last year a group of Jamaican researchers estimated that up to 10 per cent of Jamaican children, aged 14 to 16, are depressed and that boys accounted for 60 per cent of those with problems.

Significant pockets of depression

Other studies have suggested significant pockets of depression in the country, like the one assessing nearly 600 people at a Maxfield Park clinic early in the decade. In that survey, 17 per cent of the sample suffered from moderate depression and five per cent were deemed to be severely depressed.

A dozen years ago, a group that included Professor Graham Sarjeant of the University of the West Indies looked at 44 males and 45 females in the 18 to 24 age group and found that 14 per cent of the males and 36 per cent of the females suffered some form of psychiatric disorder.

This group called for a deeper investigation of psychiatric disorders among Jamaican young people. That call should be heeded if it has not yet been done; but, just as important, we have to work to remove the stigma from mental illness and to make it normal for people to get help.

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