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 Mate

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.

Rose Cartwright's personal journey through the mental health system, as detailed in her autobiography, is both enlightening and inspiring. Her interactions with patients and insights from top psychologists and scientists make this non-fiction book a significant contribution to the field of psychology.

HarperCollins 2024