Counting the Rivers

Madeleine Roberts fears that she is losing her mind, but her search for treatment leads her into mortal danger. She decides to enter a psychiatric institution, where she is drugged and disoriented by electroconvulsive treatment until her will to live is almost broken.

In Counting the Rivers Pearlie McNeill draws on her experiences as a patient in several psychiatric hospitals, along with chilling extracts from her own medical file, to create a gripping account of one woman's struggle to salvage her fragile sense of self from the onslaughts of a system that denies the humanity of all.

Counting the Rivers is Pearlie McNeill's second book. Her first was One of the Family, the story of her childhood in Sydney.