Bodley Head snaps up Mitchell's foray into psychedelics

Neuroscientist and clinical psychologist Andrew Mitchell’s “panoramic view of the renewed interest in psychedelics” has been signed by The Bodley Head.  

Deputy publishing director Will Hammond acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for Breakthrough from Will Francis at Janklow & Nesbit. Karen Rinaldi bought North American rights for HarperWave from P J Mark and Ian Bonaparte at Janklow & Nesbit. Publication will be in 2023. 

“The book will combine an expert’s knowledge of the medical literature with personal experience of the compounds themselves, bringing to the general reader the most comprehensive and vivid account of their properties and effects, their possibilities and dangers, placing them within the context of their anthropological and cultural history as well as their commercialised reinvention and therapeutic future,” Bodley Head said. 

"Part popular science, part personal adventure, part investigation into human nature, Breakthrough will take the reader from the jungle shamans of Iquitos, to bespoke addiction treatment centres in the Rockies, via micro-dosing cosmopolitan youth, self-mythologising brigands in Cameroon, aspiring lamas in the Himalayas and depressed Mennonite communities in North America. Each of the book’s 10 chapters will have as their basis a different plant- or animal-based psychedelic material, and the reading experience will ultimately be a ‘journey’ in its own right."

Mitchell is a clinical neuropsychologist with experience treating patients with trauma, depression, anxiety, life-changing illness and disability.