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”.