Danielle Johnson was worried about the eclipse.
The astrology influencer and “divine healer” who went by the name Danielle Ayoka online called the upcoming astronomical event “the epitome of spiritual warfare” and told people they needed to “pick a side,” in posts on X on April 4.
Less than three days later, in the early morning before the partial solar eclipse, Johnson left a trail of tragedy in her wake: her partner stabbed to death in the kitchen of the family apartment in Woodland Hills, her 8-month-old baby dead after being pushed from Johnson’s moving Porsche Cayenne on the 405, and Johnson herself dead after crashing her car on Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach.
Diagnosis and identifying mental illness are 2 different things. Mental illness is a very low threshold and this person was clearly delusional and it lead to their death. That’s a mental illness… de facto. And you can’t fake suicide… she’s dead.
By saying “she’s mentally ill”… that is a diagnosis.
So in saying she’s delusional.
Saying suicide is proof of illness is also troublesome. Same goes for murder-suicide.
The fact is you don’t know, I don’t know. No one here knows.
What I do know is plenty of rational people with no diagnosable mental issues commit suicide, murder and even murder-suicide.
You can’t be diagnosed “mentally ill”. That is an adjective, not a condition. It would be completely different if they said “this person clearly has bipolar disorder and I am stating this solely from the contents of this article”. That is an unfounded diagnosis. Specificity is important here.
Delusional is a technical term used to describe a symptom present in a vast swath of mental illnesses. It’s also a common term used to describe a set of behaviors in an informal way. Suicide is an act that is (more often than not) proceeded by bouts of mental illness in some form or fashion, be it chronic or acute.
Take any one of the behaviors displayed by this person (delusions, antisocial behavior, suicide) in a vacuum, and sure, it’s not enough to make an educated guess on whether an individual is mentally ill or not. But when you have someone who quickly escalates their atypical behavior from going on anti semitic and conspiratorial rants(delusion), to thinking the eclipse is the beginning of a period of spiritual warfare(delusion), into killing their partner and infant child (antisocial behavior) in gruesome, erratic fashion, into committing suicide, it’s pretty easy to deduce that this person had some mental issues. Whether this illness was chronic, acute, substance induced, etc. her behavior shows a clear progression into a state of some significant mental illness. There’s enough here to make an educated, informed statement that this person was mentally ill.
You don’t have to be a psychologist to recognize this person wasn’t in a state of mind that could reasonably be called stable or “sane”.
Rational people don’t believe in conspiracy theories though right?
Do you believe in Jan 6’s insurrection?
How do you feel about MK Ultra? Echelon?
Or or that MLK was killed by the government? (Or rather that federal agencies were involved to some degree.)
Most Americans believe in a deity I call “the magical sky daddy”. Are they all mentally ill? What about everyone else who believes in a theistic deity?
The vast majority of humans believe in some form of discrete spiritual world; with absolutely zero real evidence of its existence. Are they delusional or am I the one delusion because I don’t believe?
If I’m the delusion one… how is it decided? They’re all so contradictory. Majority vote? Guess we’re Buddhists.
Random lot? Guess we’re some form of shamanism.
Maybe we cycle through? Can’t wait for the cult of Dionysus. I hear their parties are wild.
It doesn’t take a mental illness to perceive the world in a way different than you do. And if it’s everyone else who is insane… I got news for you.
Even if you’re taking about things like the moon landing being a hoax or Covid vaccines. That doesn’t require mental illness. Most wouldn’t even have anything particularly noteworthy. (Maybe anxiety. Stress. Depression. Things we all have to some degree- most don’t need intervention,)
You’re dehumanizing people when you blame things like conspiracies on mental illness. It’s that simple.
Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn’t. We don’t know that.
What we do know? She had a monetized YT channel. She was a snake oil saleswoman. Maybe she genuinely believed all that… but I doubt it.