Jamison begins the Prologue with an anecdote: it is in the middle of the night and she is in a manic state, running wildly, while her colleague at the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Medical Center, with whom she has been drinking, is impatiently waiting for her to leave. A police car pulls up; she is unable to focus, but her colleague explains that they are faculty in the psychiatry department, and the officer lets them on their way.

The author explains that in 1974, she was 28 years old, had just been appointed an assistant professor at UCLA, and was “well on [her] way to madness” (4). (While the author uses the term madness here and throughout the text, toward the end of the book, she discusses terminology, aware that this term, and others she uses, are considered to be impolite, or even offensive, by some.) She had always been moody, “Intensely emotional as a child” and “mercurial as a young girl” before manic-depressive illness began to fully take hold of her (4). As a result, she made the study of moods, and manic-depressive illness in particular, her field of study; she writes that “[t]he Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful,” and asserts that this is her aim, here and in her work (5).