The Maps We Carry

Psychedelics, trauma and our new path to mental health

By: Rose Cartwright

‘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?

Someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds.

Antidepressant use in the West has more than doubled in the last twenty years.

Yet no biological test can diagnose any mental health problem.

So where are we going wrong?

Rose Cartwright was once the poster-girl for OCD. Now, she reveals how the failure of the mental health system led her to radical action. Uncovering her trauma through a series of mind-bending psychedelic trips, she explores a new path to healing.

If you have ever asked yourself: ‘why am I like this?’

This revolutionary book – part memoir, part manifesto – could change your life.

©2024 Rose Cartwright (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic 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