The Maps We Carry

‘Rose Cartwright breaks all our old certainties and liberates us to approach our mental struggles with new humanity and creativity. The book cannot fail to interest anyone concerned with their mind’s bewildering beautiful complexities’ ALAIN DE BOTTON

'Radically open-minded. An extraordinary, paradigm-shifting work' NATHAN FILER

Featuring interviews with leading figures including Amanda Fielding, Michael Pollan and Gabor Maté

What if treating misery as a medical problem is making us miserable?

What if our intense distress is not a symptom of illness, but a desperate expression of our need for love and connection?

Someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds. Antidepressant use in the West has more than doubled in the last twenty years. And there is still no biological test which can diagnose any mental health problem.

So where are we going wrong?

In this revolutionary book, Rose Cartwright reveals how the failure of the mental health system to cure her OCD led her to radical action. While she explored her trauma through a series of mind-bending psychedelic trips, she began to interrogate our dominant medical paradigm.

Part radical manifesto, part revealing memoir, The Maps We Carry provides a new path to understanding and re-evaluating our approaches to mental health. This is a book is for everyone who has questioned why they are the way they are.

Reviews

‘An uncommonly valuable book which asks all the important questions of mental health and arrives at conclusions which are novel, kind, imaginative and useful. Rose Cartwright breaks all our old certainties and liberates us to approach our mental struggles with new humanity and creativity. The book cannot fail to interest anyone concerned with their mind’s bewildering beautiful complexities’ Alain de Botton

'It's rare to find a book on mental health with such clarity of intelligence and heart. Radically open-minded. An extraordinary, paradigm-shifting work' Nathan Filer

Reviews for Rose Cartwright’s PURE:

‘This book is written with such staggering honesty your jaw might literally drop at certain moments. This is a very welcome look at unwelcome thoughts and how minds can stage their own uprisings against us. There is pain here, but also a lot of humour and Rose writes with such dead-on frankness that you are gripped from the first to last page’ Matt Haig

'Bold and darkly funny' ES Magazine

'Bright and funny. . . Pure is an enlightening read helping to highlight a form of mental illness that has been hushed up for so long' Independent

About the author

Rose Cartwright is a screenwriter whose memoir, Pure, about her life with intrusive sexual thoughts, was adapted for Channel 4. Her writing about psychedelics, consciousness and mental health has been published in The Face, Vice and the Guardian. Rose is a writer on the Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem.