Requiem for a Psychedelic Holy Lady
Amanda Feilding in 1970, the same year she drilled a hole in her head. Credit: Beckley Foundation.
HOBOKEN, JUNE 18, 2025. The phrase “Holy Lady” in my headline is a play on words. Let me explain.
The New York Times just published an obituary that begins: “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.”
I crossed paths with the countess while researching my book Rational Mysticism. It was 2001, and I was covering "Altered States of Consciousness," a conference at the New School in New York City. There were lots of boring talks on psychedelics. You’d think all discussions of psychedelics would be fascinating, but no.
On the shindig’s last day, I was thinking of catching a train home, but I decided to attend a cocktail reception. I found myself chatting with a tall, slim, elegant woman who spoke with an upper-class British accent. She wasn’t boring.
Her name, she said, was Amanda Feilding, but she was also known as Lady Neidpath. She came from an aristocratic family. She ran the Beckley Foundation, which funded research on psychedelics. I knew some of the scientists she supported.
Feilding traced her obsession with psychedelics to a Dutch chemist, Bart Huges, with whom she fell in love in the 1960s. Huges piqued her interest not only in LSD but also in trepanation, an ancient technique that involves boring holes in skulls. Just as psychedelics have spiritual and therapeutic benefits, Feilding assured me, so does trepanation.
In 1970 she filmed herself drilling a hole in her forehead with a dental drill. She showed her film, which she titled “Heartbeat in the Brain,” to select audiences. Rock stars like The Rolling Stones were intrigued by trepanation, according to Feilding, but none, as far as she knew, got their heads drilled. (According to The Times obit, several viewers fainted at a screening of the film in New York City.)
Still shots from Amanda Feilding’s 1970 film of her self-trepanation, “Heartbeat in the Brain.” The Times says people who saw the film in the 1970s fainted. Credit: Wikipedia.
After trepanation, Feilding informed me, the hole gradually closes as bone and skin grow back, so you need to get re-drilled to sustain the benefits. Feilding didn’t want to drill her own head again, and no British surgeon would trepan her. But she found surgeons in other countries to do the job.
After Feilding told me this story, I asked her, as delicately as possible, if she had a hole in her head right now. She said she did. I asked if I could see her hole, and she drew the hair back from her forehead. There was an indentation just under her hairline. She gave me her card, and we parted. We never spoke again.
In 2015 I spotted a profile of Feilding in The Guardian. It linked to a clip, on YouTube, from her 1970 film of her self-trepanation. The clip is no longer available on YouTube, but I watched and took notes on it in 2015.
The clip shows Feilding, then 27, preparing herself for self-trepanation by trimming her bangs. The film then cuts to the aftermath of her operation. Feilding’s head is bandaged, her face covered in blood.
In a voice-over on the clip, Feilding—in a lovely Downton Abbey voice--expresses the hope that her film will inspire research needed to get trepanation accepted as a standard medical procedure by Britain's National Health Service. "I'm not in favor of self-trepanation," Feilding says. "I think it should be done by the medical profession."
Feilding had no luck promoting trepanation. But her efforts to make psychedelics respectable paid off, big time. Her Times obit reports that in 2019 “she founded Beckley Psytech, a pharmaceutical company that is developing rapid-acting psychedelic medicines for commercial use. Ms. Feilding’s company was sold this month to Atai Life Sciences--a company backed by the billionaire Peter Thiel--in a deal valued at $390 million.”
Oh, what a bitter, ironic legacy for Feilding. Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter, isn’t investing in psychedelics because he hopes they will catalyze the creation of a hippy paradise. No, Thiel, I’m guessing, is investing in psychedelics with two hopes in mind:
1, Psychedelics, aggressively marketed, will become blockbuster treatments for mental illness, replacing ineffective current medications.
2, Psychedelics, far from enlightening the masses, will make them even more susceptible to manipulation by power-hungry jerks like Thiel and Trump.
Sorry, I meant this to be a fun obit for the Holy Lady, and it ended up being a sad obit for the Psychedelic Pipedream. RIP.
Further Reading:
Will Psychedelics Save Us? Nah
The Drug-Based Approach to Mental Illness Has Failed. What Are Alternatives?