The Maps We Carry

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What to expect

‘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.

Critics Review

  • ‘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

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