British campaigner and scientific collaborator who fought to rehabilitate the study of psychedelics. She died on May 22nd 2025, aged 82.
Feilding grew up in an upper-class bohemian farming family at Beckley, a three-towered Tudor hunting lodge with an Oxford postcode. The family were cash-poor but land-rich. She was largely isolated as a child and barely socialised. She won the science prize at school but dropped out to study mysticism. In 1995 she married the Earl of Wemyss.
In December 1970 Feilding trepanned herself in her attic using a pedal-operated dentist's drill, making a half-centimetre hole in the middle of her forehead. She was influenced by her lover Bart Huges, a young Dutch scientist who believed mental illness stemmed from sluggish blood-flow to the brain. She ran twice as an independent candidate for her Chelsea constituency, offering trepanning on the NHS; on her second run in 1983 her vote doubled to 139.
In 1996 Feilding established the Beckley Foundation, named after her family home. Its headquarters was a five-person office in a converted cowshed at Beckley. From 1998 she hosted 11 international seminars on drug policy for government ministers and intellectuals in the House of Lords.
The foundation collaborated with leading laboratories. With Johns Hopkins in 2006 it produced the first scientific evidence that psilocybin might be useful in treating nicotine addiction. A collaboration with Imperial College, published a decade later, confirmed psilocybin seemed to help in treatment-resistant depression. The foundation also helped generate the first images of the brain on LSD.
Feilding co-authored more than 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Among her collaborators was Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had synthesised LSD.
While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several.