Amanda Feilding, the Countess of Wemyss and March, who was a pivotal and eccentric figure in the movement to legitimize the study of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic purposes, died on May 22 at Beckley Park, her 16th-century estate near Oxford, England. She was 82.
Her death, from liver cancer, was announced by the Beckley Foundation, the organization she started in a cowshed on her moated property to fund scientific studies of LSD, magic mushrooms and Ecstasy, all of which she adored.
Known as Lady Mindbender and the Crackpot Countess, Ms. Feilding once drilled a tiny hole in her skull to increase blood flow, a medieval practice called trepanning. She believed that psychedelic drugs could be used to treat depression and other maladies, now a promising area of scientific study.
“Amanda was a bridge between the ’60s era of psychedelics and this new therapeutic renaissance of psychedelics,” Michael Pollan, the author of “How to Change Your Mind,” a 2018 best seller about the science of these drugs, said in an interview. “She was an essential motivating force in this field.”
A descendant of aristocrats, Ms. Feilding grew up at Beckley Park, a 400-acre compound that her grandparents — close friends of Henry James and Aldous Huxley — bought in 1919. The property had once been the site of a hunting lodge for King Henry III’s brother, and living there was a kind of fairy tale.
“It was a strange, isolated world, and its grip was strong,” she said in House & Garden magazine last year. “The house was very much a Sleeping Beauty castle, with everything overgrown except the topiary — even that was a jungle threatening to take over at any minute.”
In the mid-1960s, she fell in love with Bart Huges, a handsome Dutch scientist who was a proponent of trepanning and LSD, the powerful hallucinogenic drug made from lysergic acid diethylamide.
“I had the choice of going ahead with the love affair and taking LSD every day, in big doses, or not being with him,” Ms. Feilding told The London Standard in 2024. “So I took the LSD.”
The experience was a “gift of the gods,” she later said, “that could expand one’s vision and understanding of reality.” Anxious to stretch the boundaries of her mind further, Ms. Feilding became obsessed with trepanning, believing that puncturing the skull relieved pressure and increased blood flow, perhaps creating a permanent high.
No surgeons were willing to participate, so she bored the hole herself, in her attic — with a dental drill, after injecting herself with an anesthetic. She filmed the procedure and made a short documentary about it called “Heartbeat in the Brain” (1970). A screening of the film at Suydam Gallery in New York made several viewers faint.
“In the film, Ms. Feilding cut off her fringe and applied the drill,” Anthony Haden-Guest wrote in New York magazine. “Minutes flitted by like hours as she lost one and a half pints of very Technicolor blood. Behind me, there were sounds as of ripe plums thudding on turf as the audience thinned.”
For Ms. Feilding, the hole was a revelation.
“I thought at the time that it was rather like the tide coming in,” she told Cabinet magazine in 2007. “I felt a certain peace, it felt like a return, like I was rising in myself to a more natural level.”
Ms. Feilding continued taking LSD, noting how much better she felt even after the hallucinations ended.
“I was a slight depressive and always noted that psychedelics lifted me out of my depressions,” she told The Standard. “I wanted to investigate this — to understand why.”
She contacted scientists, but nobody would take her seriously. For one thing, she talked openly about her long-term relationship with a pigeon. (“We were twin souls,” she once said, “a pair of lovers, completely inseparable.”) But there was also a scientific hangover from the criminalization of psychedelics during the peace-and-love era of the 1960s.
In the early 1990s, Ms. Feilding realized that the only way to overcome the taboo of these drugs — and her reputation as a crackpot — was to start a scientific foundation to fund research projects that governments and universities would never consider. The first board members included the scientists Albert Hofmann and Alexander Shulgin.
She organized conferences and even addressed the House of Lords.
“Well, anyone can do it,” she told The Standard. “You just have to know a lord.”
Ms. Feilding knew many. Her societal status helped her raise money from wealthy contacts. The organization partnered with prominent scientists like David Nutt, who is now at Imperial College London, and Robin Carhart-Harris, now at the University of California, San Francisco.
They embarked on a series of studies of LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA (Ecstasy), showing that these counterculture drugs were capable of alleviating symptoms of depression, anxiety and other disorders. Ms. Feilding was listed as a co-author on more than 80 scientific papers.
In 2019, she founded Beckley Psytech, a pharmaceutical company that is developing rapid-acting psychedelic medicines for commercial use. Earlier this month, Ms. Feilding’s company was sold to Atai Life Sciences — a company backed by the billionaire Peter Thiel — in a deal valued at $390 million.
“Many people made fun of Amanda — you know, Lady Mindbender, the woman who drilled a hole in her head,” Dr. Carhart-Harris said in an interview. “But she was a real gem, a national treasure and really a visionary in this field.”
Amanda Claire Marian Feilding was born on Jan. 30, 1943, in Oxford. Her parents, Basil and Margaret Feilding, were second cousins and descendants of the Hapsburgs, the Austrian dynasty, and two children of Charles II.
Her father was an artist, but never made much money, leaving the family culturally rich but cash poor. Heating and electricity were considered extravagant.
“My father adored beauty,” she told The Standard, “so any money he could lay his hands on, he’d buy beautiful things.”
Amanda attended a convent school but dropped out when she was 16 and set off for Sri Lanka to practice Buddhism, but never made it there. She later studied comparative religion at Oxford University, but did not graduate.
She had a number of love affairs with men who also drilled small holes in their heads, including Mr. Huges and the writer Joseph Mellen, with whom she was in a relationship from 1968 to 1993. In 1995, she married James Charteris, Earl of Wemyss and March.
He survives her, along with two sons from her relationship to Mr. Mellen, Rock Feilding-Mellen and Cosmo Feilding-Mellen; two stepchildren, Richard Charteris and Mary Charteris; four grandchildren; and one step-granddaughter.
A week before she died, Ms. Feilding posted a message on the Beckley Foundation’s website.
“It is 60 years since I first tried LSD and discovered the extraordinary potential psychedelics have to help individuals and society,” she wrote. “The taboo has been broken.”
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