Training
Once confined to subcultures and the fringes of medicine, psychedelics have erupted into the mainstream as a breakthrough treatment for chronic depression, PTSD and other pressing mental health issues. As the 21st century confronts us with crises on all fronts, we are seeing more and more people taking their emotional and spiritual wellbeing into their own hands, which comes with all the attendant risks and opportunities of self-medication. Alongside this movement, drug use in recreational settings has gone mainstream over the last decade, with MDMA and ketamine use at record levels among young people.
The practice of harm reduction offers an effective way to reduce and re-contextualize the risks of unsupervised drug use, reducing antagonism between party-goers and organisers, and equipping therapists and health professionals with the knowledge to de-escalate and transform crises.
By creating an environment where the risks of drug use are explained and crisis support is available, drug users can choose to accept support rather than isolate themselves dangerously or act out, allowing for more effective deployment of other resources towards serious emergencies while unlocking the potential for transformative care. Welfare has long been integral to alternative spaces, and PsyCare was formed out of a peer-led initiative to keep the drug users in our communities safe. We offer an opportunity to share in our expertise gained over a decade of operating in some of the most challenging festival environments alongside medical services.
Format and Booking
Our training is delivered by our senior members of staff, either in-person or remotely. The courses are experiential and designed to suit a variety of learning styles, including visual aids, group discussion, movement and awareness exercises, case studies and examples, as well as sharing accessible and relevant theory from neuroscience to pharmacology. You’ll come away with reference materials and a certificate of completion.
Please get in touch with us at by using our contact form to enquire about upcoming training dates, or to ask us any further questions you might have about the content or format of the training.
Bespoke Training
PsyCare’s dedicated network of field workers, doctors, nurses, therapists, recovery workers and researchers holds a wealth of knowledge and experience which they are enthusiastic to share. We are proud to count pioneers of the current psychedelic renaissance among our colleagues, as well as many unsung heroes of the welfare and recovery movements of the last decades. As well as the public courses on offer below, we also offer bespoke training and consultancy for your organisation or volunteer group, tailored to the needs of your client base and staff. This could include specialised topics such as: poly drug use, LGBTQ+ drug use and patterns of addiction.
De-Escalating Psychedelic Crisis
In this course aimed at therapists, facilitators, healthcare workers and harm reduction workers, you’ll learn trauma-aware embodied relational approaches to de-escalating crises and transforming drug-induced distress and dissociative states. Drawing on over a decade of experience operating in challenging circumstances, the course covers a comprehensive approach including a theoretical basis, preparation and integration, as well as the concrete skills and approaches necessary to support someone in profoundly altered states of consciousness.
Crisis and Co-regulation
In recent years, the neuroscience of trauma has gone from a specialist concern for recovery workers, to a fundamental part of the public conception of mental health. Understanding what is happening in the human body during a crisis makes de-escalating situations possible, and also helps to avoid harmful attempts to “stop” or punish a crisis that has a survival value to the organism. In accessible and easy-to-digest terms, we’ll cover models of crisis, including Dr Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, and introduce the idea of co-regulation – how nervous systems influence each other, and what this means for “holding space” for others.
Prevention and Triage
As that frustratingly true maxim goes: “prevention is the best cure”. One way to reduce the chance of a crisis is to create an environment that supports safe behaviours and aids de-escalation. This can include outreach (making proactive contact), education (spreading harm reduction knowledge), and normalising seeking help. Triage is the next step: ensuring that you can identify when a case needs medical attention, or when it’s outside your competence – and we will teach a method for assessing whether someone is a high-risk individual, with additional vulnerabilities.
The Container:
Relationship, Safety and the Senses
Our approach is grounded in humanistic therapy, in that we believe that it is the relationship that heals. We will cover our approach to quickly building trust and rapport with individuals in crisis, and offer key ways in which you can demonstrate your warmth and unconditional positive regard to people who may be confused and in panic. Safety is key to managing panic, and we will support you to develop a trauma-aware lens that can identify and neutralise perceived threats for the client. The environment that we create also plays a vital role in holding this relationship, so we introduce sensory measures and how to physically create an environment that can support safety on a neurological level.
Handling Delusions and Aggression
Responding to delusional and challenging behaviour is often what pushes helping professionals well beyond their training and into uncharted territory. We will introduce a simple way to understand and respond to the client’s delusions or fixed beliefs as a survival mechanism, encouraging you to work within their narrative, concentrating on the emotions at play, creating safety, and introducing your own perspective. Aggression is often where the rules go out the window, and we will share our methods for working with clients who enter into meltdowns and dissociative rages.
Debriefing and Integration
After going through a crisis, either first-hand or as the crisis worker, it’s vital that the experience is given context and support. Experiences can become traumatising when we attempt to make sense of them in isolation, so we will introduce peer support methods for you and your colleagues, as well as introducing and giving concrete details on how to support your clients in the integration of their difficult or overwhelming experience.
Drugs Training for Event Staff
In this course aimed at promoters, venue owners, security, medical, nightclub and crisis response staff, you’ll get a thorough grounding in the knowledge necessary to prepare for, identify and mitigate the risks of drug use and drug-induced crises. As well as best practices and a chance to ask questions of experienced harm reduction workers, you’ll come away with tangible examples of policies and procedures that you can adapt for your event, team or venue. You’ll meet experienced crisis workers and event organisers who can guide you through the process of reducing the risk and harm caused by drug use by attendees at your events.
Harm reduction and festivals
We’ll introduce the harm reduction approach to managing risk: what it is, why we adopt it as an organisation, and evidence of its effectiveness. Drug taking is on the rise in venues and festivals, and we’ll explain why this approach is far less risky than zero tolerance, and places less of a burden on your staff and emergency services. We’ll talk about its relevance to festivals, a growing sector of increasing interest to local and national government, as well as organisations and efforts that already exist in this field that you can take advantage of to craft your own organisation’s response.
Understanding drugs
You’ll be given a crash course on some of the most prevalent club drugs in circulation, with background on their effects, risks, typical populations that use them, and concrete harm reduction strategies for mitigating risk for each. We’ll draw on our work in this sector to provide case studies, as well as exploring your existing expertise and experience, to demystify these powerful substances and the social behaviours that surround them. Each substance has its own characteristic risk profile, and understanding the difference between their effects will help ensure that any interventions de-escalate risk, rather than compounding the negative effects.
We’ll give examples relevant to different classes of drugs: psychedelics, depressants, stimulants, cannabinoids, empathogens and dissociatives. We’ll focus on party drugs you’re likely to encounter: LSD (acid), MDMA (ecstacy), GHB, ketamine and cocaine, with additional information on psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and amphetamine (speed).
Managing drug use at festivals
Difficult experiences are a possible risk when taking any substance – you’ll learn about resources that you can put in place to reduce the risk of these happening in the first place, as well as approaches to de-escalating crises that can reduce the burden on your staff and emergency services. We can talk about how to handle acute drug presentations, with a simple and comprehensive approach to assessment to decide whether a crisis is medical or can be handled by welfare staff. This will include how to identify and mitigate high risk guests, who may be vulnerable in one or more ways, and the approaches that we’ve found most effective to handling drug-induced crises. We’ll explain environmental measures, easy ways to educate your attendees and staff, and ensuring good collaboration between security, medical and welfare. We’ll also explain the benefits of having a specialist welfare team at your event, and cover what’s out there in terms of harm reduction organisations and crisis response services.