Borough Press pre-empts memoir of 'psychedelic trauma healing' by Cartwright

The Borough Press has pre-empted Body Story, a new memoir of "psychedelic trauma healing" by the author of Pure (Unbound), Rose Cartwright.

Ann Bissell, deputy publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Crystal Mahey-Morgan at OWN IT!. A memoir that "challenges the medicalisation of distress", Body Story will be published in hardback, e-book and audio in April 2024, The Borough Press’ 10th anniversary year.

The publisher said: "Body Story explores the potential for psychedelics and altered states of consciousness to disrupt how we think about suffering and healing. Through interviews with professionals and Rose’s own experiences in underground psychedelic therapy, the book will interrogate biological reductionism in psychiatry, exploring the ways disadvantaged groups suffer when social context is overlooked."

Cartwright is a screenwriter whose memoir, Pure, about her life with intrusive sexual thoughts, was adapted by Channel 4. Her writing about psychedelics, consciousness and mental health has been published in the Face, Vice and the Guardian. She is currently adapting Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem (Head of Zeus) for Netflix.

Cartwright said: "Psychedelics broke open my heart, disrupted my stuckness and gave me my life back. I welcome their ‘renaissance’ but I’m concerned about psychedelic therapy being plugged into siloed and medicalised psychiatry, where brain is decontextualised from body. Present from past. Science from indigenous wisdom. Individual story from social story.

"The antidote is integration: bringing people and ideas together, and open-sourcing information. I’ve written this book in that spirit. I hope it offers a positive vision for what healing can mean, for anyone who feels stuck."

Bissell added: "Rose Cartwright’s proposal blew me away. Body Story will challenge the existing narrative framework surrounding mental health diagnoses and propose holistic and radical new ways of understanding and treating mental health conditions.

"This is a book that we at Borough Press believe will disrupt and interrogate the dominant narrative and we hope will become the definitive conversation starter in mental health. Rose writes with breathtaking honesty and vulnerability and I’m so very proud to publish her."

Mahey-Morgan commented: "The evolving conversation around the use of psychedelic therapy in medicine has the potential to create revolutionary change in how we think, diagnose and treat people with mental health struggles, and Rose is perfectly placed to explore this. Her strength to be vulnerable and share her own journey with mental health, healing and psychedelics offers us all a chance to understand more about the human experience in all its complexities."