Amanda Feilding

Amanda Charteris, Countess of Wemyss and March, (nee Fielding), is a British artist, scientist and drug policy reformer. She is scientific director and founder of the Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust that promotes health orientated cost effective harm reductive drug policy reform. The Foundation both works at the forefront of national and international global drug policy reform and initiates and directs research into consciousness and its altered states.

Feilding is the youngest child of Basil Feilding (himself a great-grandson of the 7th Earl of Denbigh and the Marquess of Bath) and his wife and cousin Margaret Feilding. She grew up at Beckley Park outside Oxford. Since the late 60s she lived with Joseph Mellen with whom she had two sons, Rock Basil Hugo Feilding Mellen (born 1979) and Cosmo Birdie Feilding Mellen (born 1985). She and Mellen separated in the early 90s and on 29 January 1995, she married James Charteris, 13th Earl of Wemyss, 9th Earl of March, son of David Charteris, 12th Earl of Wemyss, 8th Earl of March.

She studied Comparative Religions and Mysticism with Prof. R.C. Zaehner and later did research into psychology and altered states of consciousness. She gained notoriety in the early 1970s when she performed trepanation on herself, about which she made a short cult art film entitled "Heartbeat in the Brain", shown only to invited audiences. During the 1970s and 80s she painted, and produced conceptual artworks to do with consciousness, which were exhibited at PS1 in New York and other galleries in the US. She also wrote "Blood and Consciousness".

Feilding has long had interest in exploring different ways of modulating consciousness for the benefit of the individual and society. She has investigated many different ways of altering consciousness from meditation to the use of psychoactive substances and trepanation.

Feilding, influenced by Bart Huges who published a scroll on the topic, believes that trepanation allows greater blood flow to the brain, which Feilding believes was decreased when our ancestors began to walk upright. To compensate for this theorized decrease, she hypothesizes humanity developed an internal system of controlling blood flow in the brain, a development that Feilding identifies with the origins of language. Trepanation, Feilding believes, allows people to achieve higher states of consciousness that she theorizes children experience before fusion of the cranial bones. Recent research carried out by Feilding on patients with cranial lesions in collaboration with Prof. Yuri Moskalenko has provided evidence of blood flow changes. This is part of a larger research programme investigating how intracranial dynamics change as we age, and what can be done to increase cranial compliance which they theorize might to help limit some of the detrimental changes associated with aging. Through this research, a new, non-invasive means of assessing intracranial dynamics, "The Moskalenko Method", has been developed by Moskalenko, Feilding, et al.

Feilding ran for British Parliament twice, on the platform 'Trepanation for the National Health' with the intention of advocating research into its potential benefits, but received few votes (40 in 1979 and 139 in 1983). 35 years later, she is funding this research at the Sechenov Institute for Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, St. Petersburg.

Beckley Foundation

Through the Beckley Foundation, Feilding is engaged in a programme of research using psychedelics as tools to alter consciousness.

On January 2012 The Beckley Foundation & Imperial College Psychedelic Research Programme Surprising findings of Research: Potential therapeutic applications of psychedelic drugs fMRI brain scans show that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, lowers the activity of specific brain regions. The finding contradicts the popular belief that psychedelic drugs increase brain activity.

In 2007, her LSD study on consciousness was one of the first involving LSD and human participants since the late 1980s.

She is also collaborating on other psychedelic research projects. These include: investigating the efficacy of using psilocybin as an aid to psychotherapy in overcoming addiction; a brain imaging study investigating the effects of psilocybin on cerebral blood supply and the recall of distant memories; the neurophysiology underlying the effects of cannabis that the users find beneficial; the effects of cannabis on the creative process; the effects of the different components of cannabis and the importance of the THC/CBD ratio in mental health.

Feilding is also active in drugs policy reform, arguing that benefits as well as harms should be considered in forming policies. In 2007, Feilding convened the Global Cannabis Commission Report, authored by a group of leading drug policy analysts, which lays out a blueprint for possible reforms of cannabis control policies at national and international levels. The Report was presented at the 10-yearly UN General Assembly Global Drug Policy Review in Vienna in March 2009 (the Beckley Foundation is a UN accredited NGO). The Cannabis Commission Report is being published by Oxford University Press and the Beckley Foundation.

Feilding is also the founder of the Trepanation Trust.

External links

• Biography of Amanda Feilding at Beckley Foundation website.