Andy Mitchell

Growing up in Leeds Andy Mitchell was the singer in a punk band called 'Armitage Shanks’—named after the UK’s premier toilet manufacturer. He read English Literature at Oxford and after flirting with a career in academic philosophy, he spent several years as an avant-gardish screenwriter—there’s a good reason you’ve never seen classics like ‘God’s Toxic Piss’ and the Rom-Com ‘World of Pain.’

Plagued by pretentiousness and uselessness, Andy ran a separate career helping to establish an NGO which provided emotional and practical to support to the homeless in Leeds. Later he would work in a similar vein with Mexican gangs in Los Angles and with disabled children in Northern India.This work implied broader existential questions and in his late twenties Andy spent three years as a monk, in Big Sur, California.

It was only in his early thirties that Andy began his clinical career, first of all in psychology and later in neuroscience. Over the next fifteen years he worked across a range of mental health and neurological settings, from intensive care to community rehabilitation. With a longstanding background in meditation he recently took a sabbatical in Asia to consider ways in which different mindfulness practices might be applied to neurological patients.

And it was during this sabbatical that Andy stumbled into his first psychedelic ceremony. Curiously this has led him, full circle, back to writing again—books but also tv screenplays—as well as voluntary clinical work in Europe, America and Asia.