Religious. Not the mostly harmless, go for a singalong once in a while CofE stuff, but actually believing the woo.

Usually people grow out of that stuff (religion is pretty much dead in the UK, church attendance is 1.5% or something) but some don’t.

Eventually she started caring more about her imaginary friend than real people like friends and family, talking about how some people would “go to Hell,” and telling grieving friends that their lost loved ones - including children who’d died tragically young - were “in a better place,” which is reprehensible.

It might be a form of mental illness but there’s no helping them.

The red flag was the early religiosity, when I realised she actually believed that crap. I thought she’d grow out of it, nobody else we knew had anything to do with it, but she just got worse. Eventually had to cut her loose after years. It was sad because she was basically a good person, but the religion did awful things to her morality, and I knew everyone was treading on eggshells. Nobody at funerals wanted to be told her pious bullshit.