Collaborators
Tam is Founding Director/CEO of London-based social enterprise Hope in the Heart CIC.
A prolonged experience of extreme states, diagnosed as psychosis in 1989, at age 29, and fitting the criteria of a Spiritual Emergency, has subsequently informed all areas of her life and work.
Her recovery, while successful, plateaued for several decades, until she discovered Psychedelic Assisted Therapy aged 64, and encountered a whole new level of integration and appreciation of that earlier time.
Living in East London, Tam is a Grandmother, writer, artist, poet, international group facilitator, lecturer, trainer and consultant. With a background in transpersonal therapy, she is compelled by story, legacy, and a deep connection to the Land, and committed to challenging the paradigm surrounding psychological/mental health distress, and helping others to embrace what truly matters in their lives,
Tam is endlessly excited to connect, collaborate, learn, and contribute to fresh perspectives and social change.
She is currently working on a memoir encompassing her early life, mental health, spontaneous awakening, psychedelic experiences and beyond.
Co-ConvenorTam Martin Fowles
Tehseen is a critical social scientist who has studied psychedelics since 2013, in the US, UK and Aotearoa New Zealand. This work spans both research and community engagement. Tehseen is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Pharmacy at Waipapa Taumata Tau | University of Auckland in Aotearoa, and has since 2019 been informally affiliated with Whāriki, a Kaupapa Māori (by Māori for Māori) research centre at Massey University. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal, Psychedelics, facilitates the Reimagining Psychedelic Trials working group, and is on the US Board of Psychedelic Medicine and Therapies.
Tehseen is drawn to how people make sense of unusual experiences, and the relationships between psychedelic experience, spiritual crisis, and extreme states that get pathologised - as for example psychosis or mania. He’s also interested in the politics of evidence and knowledge. His PhD from the University of Bristol in the UK from 2007-2011 was working on & with the Hearing Voices Network. He has long been committed to the practice (and question) of allyship in relation to psych survivor, mad pride and related movements.
Co-ConvenorTehseen Noorani
Sabina Wantoch
Sabina Wantoch is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in Philosophy. They are an Honorary Associate Professor at the Centre for Multidisciplinary & Intercultural Inquiry at University College London, and a consultant in peer support for mental health with Imroc. Their research generally concerns non-ordinary experience; how it is framed, navigated and responded to in the world, and how it feels, and the ways that these interrelate. Their PhD comparatively analysed the affective experience of psychiatry and the phenomenology of the peer support voice-hearing group, and how social contexts for anomalous experience affect the ontology of those experiences. They developed the ‘Worlds Framework’ as a theoretical framework for the integration of mad experience into social and clinical encounters. They have long been thinking about the intersection of madness and psychedelics and are particularly interested in how ‘fear of madness’ plays out in the varieties of psychedelic/mad experience, and how this fear is produced. They are currently exploring symbol as a methodology for mad expression and research.
Sabina is a long-term volunteer for PsyCare UK, supporting people through altered states at events on the ground and during the integration phase. They have a background in facilitating peer support groups and are passionate about the power of the group space. They are also a multidisciplinary artist, exploring animism, queerness, mythos and trauma, through poetry, theatre, and sound. Their relationship with anomalous experience and spirituality deeply informs their research and art practice, and vice versa.
Co-Convenor
Meredith Evans
Co-ConvenorMeredith is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Social Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her anthropological research uses clinical ethnography to examine the aesthetics and affective politics of care. Funded by a Wellcome Trust Early-Career Award (2026-2031), her current project, Madness in Medicine: Psychotic Experiences and Innovative Approaches to Mental Health Care in the UK, is a community-engaged clinical ethnography that explores how clinical practitioners and people with lived experience in South London are revaluing psychotic-like experiences, engaging them therapeutically as insight or illness through experimental psychedelic trials and new models of psychosis care. Her first book project, Composing Care: Aesthetics and Affect in the Clinic, draws on ethnographic research with music therapists in Canadian and American hospitals to examine how forms of care come to matter, including how they are recognized—or fail to be recognized—as clinical.
As an interdisciplinary and collaborative health researcher, Meredith’s broader work has explored questions of disability justice and the politics of sexual and reproductive health care in Canada, and the gendered dimensions of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, and an Editorial Board Member and Reviews Editor at the journal Medicine Anthropology Theory.