Amanda Guzinska has long been driven by curiosity about human behaviour and a passion for helping others. In 2011, she found her calling with PsyCare UK, starting as a volunteer and progressing to administrator, trustee, and ultimately Director in 2025. Since joining PsyCare UK, she has helped support the organisation’s growth from a grassroots initiative into a thriving therapeutic community serving hundreds each year. Amanda’s vision is to expand PsyCare UK beyond festivals by creating local community hubs nationwide, increasing access to compassionate, immediate mental health support.
Dr Josh Torrance is an innovation officer at Cranstoun. He does a mixture of harm reduction, drug policy, training delivery, drug market monitoring, social media content and various projects that aim to reshape drug treatment. One of these projects over the last year has been drugbot, a curated AI tool that can provide a practically useful answer to (almost) any questions about drugs. In his spare time he has run a welfare organisation since 2019.
Ben Holden is Health Improvement Lead with Together, Devon’s alcohol and other drugs service, and also serves as a trustee with PsyCare UK. Ben has been involved in delivering harm reduction interventions of various kinds since 2010. He has long been fascinated by consciousness and human experience and has a keen interest in what drives addiction and other forms of mental ill health. Together provide support to those experiencing addiction and have seen an increase in the numbers of those seeking support around Ketamine. Ben is currently involved in shaping the service to meet the needs of those who us ketamine through discussions with service users, local public health practitioners, urology departments and other partner organisations. He holds qualifications in Addiction Studies and Counselling Skills.
Colloquium Presentation: 13 March 2026, 3:30-5pm (Room G17, MDC, Sir Henry Wellcome Building, EX4 4QQ) & via Zoom
Harm Reduction and Psychedelic Care in the UK ‘wild’
While psychedelic research accelerates pace and psychedelic use grows, most experiences continue to unfold beyond clinical trials or facilitated therapeutic settings. They happen in festivals, homes, forests, underground communities; spaces that lack formal infrastructures and where care often emerges through improvisation, peer support, and community knowledge. What does harm reduction and care look like in this ‘wild’ of UK’s psychedelic use?
Bringing together perspectives from festival-based crisis support, public drug services, and emerging digital harm reduction tools, the panel will examine how care is enacted across different real-world contexts in the UK. Drawing on experience from PsyCare UK’s festival support work, drug service responses to emerging challenges such as ketamine use, and new digital approaches to harm reduction information and communication, we will explore how people are currently being supported beyond formal facilitated settings.
How are harm reduction practices evolving across festivals, services, and online spaces? And what can institutions and clinical practitioners learn from care practices that have developed organically at the edges?
The discussion brings together three guest speakers – contributors working at the frontline of UK harm reduction and community support: Amanda Guzinska, Dr Josh Torrance and Ben Holden, hosted by Eirini Ketzitzidou Argyri.