You make some worthwhile points, but the article mentions her condition only casually. It is useful in SAR to have some notion of a person's profile, including anything that might indicate whether or not the victim might or might not make rational decisions - so often SAR is a mental chess game, where you are trying to get inside the person's head, and deduce the decisions they would have made when faced with prevailing conditions. Something more specific than "mental illness" would have been better, but you take what you can get. It certainly does not seem that her actions were particularly normal - just off a trail that is a mile from the road and campground, and you stay there for more than twenty days?