The Maps We Carry: Psychedelics, trauma and our new path to mental health

‘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

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

Fact: Someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds.

Fact: Antidepressant use in the West has more than doubled in the last two decades.

Fact: Despite great leaps forward in other branches of medicine, no biological test can currently 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, Rose started to interrogate our dominant medical paradigm. What if people’s intense distress is not a symptom of illness, but a desperate expression of our need for love and connection? Rose set out on a quest to draw a new map of mental health, interviewing experts in psychiatry and neuroscience along the way: what she discovered will have implications for generations to come.