I immediately loved the main character and her possibly hallucinated crow. It also highlighted one of my many issues with mental health professionals—it’s hard to get help when you need it but after you’ve been diagnosed, everything can be associated with a symptom, even normal activities and feelings. I know that it’s hard to separate normal unpleasant feelings from the more harmful ones (having some experience in this area) but not everything needs to be pathologised. And in the case of this woman, she may have a psychological problem that predates her abusive husband, but he seems to be her main problem. If the psychiatric hospital is doing anything helpful for her, it seems to be mostly in giving her a reprieve from him. This story has also brought forward the ways in which men have used psychiatric problems, real or imagined, to manipulate and control women. It’s quite surrealist in places and a bit too plausible in others.
