Her sleeping pills and her pink pills lay untouched on the bedside table inside. It grew darker and darker. Over and over again Preston’s words thrummed in her mind: I believe in your grief and your fear. Isn’t that enough? No. It wasn’t enough. As long as that was the only thing he believed, she would always be just a scared little girl making up stories in her head. She would be infirm, unstable, untrustworthy, undeserving of the life she wanted. They put girls like her in attic rooms or sanatoriums, locked them up and threw away the keys.
The way Effy thinks about mental illness is strange to me. From what we've seen of her grandparents and mother, they trust modern medicine to regulate Effy's "episodes". They could have just committed her when she was younger and taken care of their "changeling problem", but they didn't.
What does she have to worry about if she just admits she has hallucinations? It's true there's social stigma and Effy would have seen that in literature, but growing up in the family she did would have insulated her. With that kind of background, I'm skeptical she would be this scared of being committed.
