In 2001, while working as a columnist for Canada's The National Post newspaper, Pearson was diagnosed with anxiety disorder and prescribed the anxiolytic Effexor.

Pearson claims that she became addicted to this substance until missing even one dose caused her to feel "like [she] was trapped in a disco club on acid with the strobe light at maximum pulse".

[1] In a National Post column written around that time, Pearson described running out of medication at night when the pharmacy was closed and lifting up the refrigerator to see if she had dropped a tablet under there.

Pearson's style is evident in the beginning to the eighth chapter, "2001: A Drugs Odyssey": When reason is the ultimate virtue—more prized than honor or courage or faith—there are few places that make one feel quite as deviant as a psychiatrist's waiting room.

Customarily, I take the elevator up to the fifth floor, and there, in addition to my psychiatrist's spacious office filled with art, is a locked ward full of humans who cannot be trusted to behave rationally.