George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) is a short novella in which a young African girl encounters a series of figures representing various aspects of the Western religious and philosophical tradition. Berry uses this text as a tool for structuring her own critique of the contemporary “professionalized helping” industries. In this chapter, Berry provides an outline of Shaw’s novella and explores the reasons she chose to work with it as an intertext, while also outlining the arguments she will make in the coming chapters. She then offers an account of her own background as a Black girl born to a Guyanese family in England in the mid-twentieth century. Berry draws a parallel between the Black Girl’s “innate common sense” and the approach to healing practiced by her family, contrasting both with the bureaucratic and hierarchical approach to mental health embodied by contemporary Western systems of care.