In just ten days, Joanna Dennehy murdered her housemate, her landlord, and a love interest, then drove across the country and attempted to carry out murders on two complete strangers she found out walking their dogs. Lacking both motive and remorse, her spree garnered a great deal of attention, with most people simply grappling to make sense of something that was ultimately nonsensical.

Nothing in her childhood would have suggested she was troubled, but as she reached adolescence she became rebellious, though that's more the norm than the exception. Unlike most teens, however, she seemed to exclude the people from her life that shed light on reality, choosing instead to surround herself with people who believed her every word, admired her faults, and followed her blindly.

She sort of stuck in that adolescent phase, with romanticized ideas of being an outsider and no beliefs, values, passions, or hobbies to ground her. Her decisions were based on impulses--to drink or take drugs, to scare off her partner and children, to create alternate versions of her life and pass off stories as the truth.

She left home at 15 to live with her 20 year old lover, John Treanor. They had two children, but she frequently told friends she never wanted them. She'd run off for days at a time and have affairs with different men and women, she was an alcoholic, and she was prone to increasingly violent temper tantrums when she didn't get her way.
When she started carrying a dagger in her boot and talking about a desire to kill someone, Treanor decided it was time to take the children and leave.

As Elizabeth Yardley put it in The Guardian:
"She came to value nothing, believe in nothing, reject society and any contribution she could make to it – pursuing only her own increasingly bizarre impulses in an existence where the line between fantasy and reality had become increasingly blurred."

She describes Joanna as someone who completely fell through the metaphorical cracks of society and implores us to look within ourselves to find ways to help people like Joanna, before they have committed multiple murders. And while I don't disagree with Yardley, I do feel the need to ask "how?"

Perhaps I'm unlucky, but I feel like I encounter quite a few people who will frequently pass their invented realities off as facts. And what's the best course of action here? You can take them aside, and tell them you don't believe them, but Joanna had dissenters as well, and those were the people she simply cut out of her life. Those closest to her, who knew her best -- her parents, sister, partner, and children, those are the people she ran the farthest from. It allowed her to maintain her illusions. She told her landlord that she had served time in prison for killing her father after he repeatedly raped her as a child -- a reality she fabricated. Whether he believed her or not, he wanted to help her, and ultimately it cost him his life.

I don't believe in pure evil, and I would never say that Joanna is beyond help, but I do wonder: when we encounter people, and we know they're full of shit, do we call them out on it? Perhaps if everyone around them tried to draw them back to reality there could be some benefit, but it seems they would just search out other people, more susceptible to their beliefs.

These people seem to operate like small scale cult leaders, they only need a few people, but those few must believe them hard and fast.

I doubt I'm alone when I say that I often feel as if I'm on a never ending quest to figure people out. As if understanding them will bring about some type of resolution. But I think it has more to do with my curiosity, and that in obtaining knowledge of something new, you slowly develop a better grasp on the complexities of the world. But when I think about people like Joanna, and the people I know who cannot stop themselves from fabricating new realities, I wonder if perhaps sometimes, attempts to understand these people are more harmful than good. Perhaps there are those rare people who defy understanding to such a degree that it would serve us best to simply not obtain that knowledge.

P.S. I mean this on an individual level, of course. I in no way think that psychiatric and behavioral health specialists should abandon people like Joanna. On the contrary, they are perhaps the only ones who can do any good for someone so adverse to reality.