Latest news with #AmandaFeilding
Times
3 days ago
- Health
- Times
Magic mushrooms enter mainstream as treatment for depression
Before her death this year, a British aristocrat once known unkindly as the 'crackpot countess' suggested science was about to answer a question she had spent her career asking: can psychedelic drugs, and magic mushrooms in particular, prove an effective treatment for long-term depression? The only way to win credibility for the benefits of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, was to use 'science as a tool to prove what one was saying was true, not part of a kind of druggy fantasy', said Amanda Feilding, who died in May, aged 88. Today, it seems as though science is finally about to come good. A growing number of countries are approving its medicinal use, including New Zealand, which on Wednesday allowed a single expert to begin to prescribe the drug. David Seymour, the deputy prime minister, said: 'Psilocybin remains an unapproved medicine, but a highly experienced psychiatrist has been granted authority to prescribe it to patients with treatment-resistant depression.' 'This is huge for people with depression who've tried everything else and are still suffering,' he added. 'If a doctor believes psilocybin can help, they should have the tools to try.' While New Zealand has only just caught up with Australia, which legalised the treatment two years ago, the evidence of its effectiveness is mixed. Clinicians in Australia have suggested that some patients improve, some do not and up to one-in-five experience a 'bad trip'. Europe, meanwhile, has been lagging. For two decades Jana Bednarova tried the 'talking cure' and antidepressants, but remained lost in depression and anxiety. Then, four years ago, she was in Amsterdam contemplating ending her life when she decided to try magic mushrooms. 'It gave me a few hours of calm and clarity,' the 49-year-old told The Times, smiling broadly at a lakeside café in the Czech capital, Prague. 'It gave me hope. Maybe I didn't have to die.' For people like Bednarova, the Czechs could be on the brink of a breakthrough. Twelve years after the country legalised cannabis for medical purposes, it is on the verge of becoming the first in Europe to do the same for psilocybin, after the lower house of its parliament approved a proposed bill to allow the drug's use in clinical settings. Legal problems relating to its recreational use have slowed research across the globe, in particular in Europe. But with increasing numbers of patients and shortages of antidepressant drugs, the Czechs are pushing ahead. Advocates say that in the long term psilocybin would reduce the burden on health services and lower the cost of treating depression during what has been described as Britain's 'mental health epidemic'. A study published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal in 2016 found that 67 per cent of participants with clinical depression were in remission within a week of taking psilocybin and 42 per cent were still free of depression three months later. Imperial College London researchers have found it is as effective as the conventional antidepressants that cost the NHS £55 million a year, while also boosting participants' wellbeing and sex drive. This evidence prompted David Nutt, a former government 'drugs tsar' and neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial, to say in 2022 that psilocybin could be a 'real alternative' in the treatment of depression. A new treatment option is urgently needed. One in six people in England take antidepressants and the number of adults seeking treatment for depression has been rising steadily over the past decade. NHS data showed 8.7 million people were on antidepressants last year, up from 6.8 million in 2016. About one in three people diagnosed with depression experience 'treatment-resistant depression', which does not respond to drugs or therapy. It is this cohort of patients — about three million people — who experts believe could benefit most from psilocybin. The Czech Republic's legislation will regulate the drug in a similar way to medicinal cannabis, with a limited number of doctors able to prescribe it. During trials patients will be housed in specialised environments and receive extensive psychotherapy. Doctors admit this makes the treatment programme expensive, but many insist the results are worth it. Jana Pazderova, who recently began psilocybin therapy, said its effect had been transformative. 'It transported me somewhere outside, to a mountain viewpoint,' she said. 'I started crying because I realised how beautiful the world is.' The therapy has also been tested on people with the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson's disease. Trials in the United States have reported that psilocybin in a controlled setting improved a patient's mood, cognition and motor function for months. No serious side-effects were recorded and a larger trial, involving 100 more patients, has been given approval. In his introduction to the Czech bill, Marek Benda, an MP from the ruling centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) who proposed the legislation, noted that drugs such as cocaine and opium were already routinely used by doctors. Adding psilocybin to the list appears to carry little political risk, it seems. • I went on a posh magic mushroom retreat. Here's what I learnt A recent survey suggested 68 per cent of Czechs would support its use in medical treatment. The bill is now due to head to the Senate, the upper house, which is expected to give it the nod. A signature from President Pavel would be the final step. Dr Pavel Mohr, a professor at the Czech National Institute of Mental Health, agreed that psilocybin had promise but said it needed to be combined with psychotherapy and significant work by the patient. A lot of regulation was also required for the drug to be managed safely, he added. 'We must clarify who can prescribe this treatment, under what conditions, and for whom,' Mohr said. 'You can't just start giving psychedelic drugs to anyone.' • Magic mushroom drug offers hope for Parkinson's patients Professor James Rucker, who leads the psychoactive trials group at King's College London, also cautioned against seeing psychedelic treatments, which have 'potentially powerful side-effects' as a panacea. 'What New Zealand have done is loosened the leash very slightly, and that is probably quite a sensible move,' he said. 'There are lots of reasons to believe psilocybin may have a powerful antidepressant effect, but it is not so easy to demonstrate this in controlled clinical trials because participants know whether they get the drug because of the effects.' Evidence collected 'in different ways, in different places, over an extended period of time' was the only way to appropriately test the drug, Rucker said. But for the millions across Europe resistant to conventional treatment, the Czech legislation 'represents hope', according to Bednarova. 'Depression is a dark cloud, a heavy weight on your chest. But now I have peace inside for the first time in so long.'
Economist
10-06-2025
- Economist
Apple has fallen behind on AI. Can it recover?
It brought us the iPhone–and changed the world. Now Apple is struggling to keep up with rapid advances in AI. Our correspondent assesses its future. China used to rely on Russian patronage. That power relationship has now largely been reversed (9:41). And remembering Amanda Feilding, who pioneered research on psychedelics (16:14). Runtime: 23 min
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Remembering Amanda Feilding, the eccentric aristocratic and psychedelics pioneer who partied with a pigeon on her shoulder and a hole in her head
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Amanda Feilding – the future Countess of Wemyss and March – was a notable eccentric on London's bohemian social scene in the late 1960s and 1970s, said Tatler. One night in December 1970, when she was 27, she arrived at a party draped in a Moroccan kaftan, with her beloved pet pigeon Birdie perched on a shoulder; on her head, a silk turban; and in her forehead, a 4cm hole that she had bored herself earlier that day, using a pedal-operated dentist's drill. She was an advocate of trepanning, an ancient practice that she thought would improve blood flow to the brain. She had prepared carefully for the surgery (even bringing a spare drill, which she needed as the first broke) and filmed it, for use in a documentary. "Heartbeat in the Brain" was so gruesome that at a screening, a reviewer reported that people fainted, "dropping off their seats like ripe plums". Feilding was ridiculed as the Crackpot Countess and Lady Mindbender – yet her legacy is a serious one, said The Daily Telegraph. When she was 22, someone spiked her drink with LSD, giving her a massive overdose from which she took months to recover. Nevertheless, she came to believe that psychedelics had potential mental health benefits, and in the 1990s she launched The Beckley Foundation, to drive serious research into the area. "I am happy to be proved wrong," she said. "What I want to do is know." She was born in 1943, and brought up at Beckley Park, a triple-moated Tudor lodge in Oxfordshire. Her parents were unconventional and so was her upbringing. "We ran wild," she once said. "We were like the Mitfords without the politics." She left school at 16, went travelling and, for a period, made money selling hand-coloured prints on London's Portobello Road. By the mid 1960s, she and her friends had discovered that small doses of LSD could make them feel "sparkly" and better able to concentrate, rather than high. Over time, she "cannily" stopped championing trepanning, which just made her seem "batty", and instead focused her efforts on psychedelics. In 2008, she co-founded a research programme at Imperial College, with Professor David Nutt; and in 2016, a Beckley/Imperial study published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry found the first evidence that psilocybin, the LSD-like ingredient in magic mushrooms, could, when used in conjunction with psychotherapy, be effective for treatment-resistant depression. She is survived by her husband, the 13th Earl of Wemyss and 9th Earl of March, and her two sons.
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The Countess of Wemyss, trepanning enthusiast who researched the medical benefits of psychedelics
The Countess of Wemyss and March, better known as Amanda Feilding, who has died aged 82, spent decades as a lonely voice crusading for the legalisation of LSD and its rehabilitation as a medical treatment, and claimed that the war on drugs had caused 'more suffering worldwide than any other act'. Once ridiculed as 'Lady Mindbender' or the 'crackpot countess of Brainblood Hall', she lived to see her life's work vindicated in the 'psychedelic renaissance' of recent years, with acid microdosing now evangelised in Silicon Valley and psychedelics heralded by regulators as a breakthrough in treating severe depression. When Amanda Feilding first encountered LSD in the mid-Sixties, she discovered with her friends that small doses – enough to feel 'sparkly' but not high – sharpened their faculties, helping them to win at the Chinese strategy game Go, or bowl better in cricket. 'We used to call it a psychovitamin,' she recalled. But the international flourishing of medical research into LSD was squashed in 1968 when a panicked US government classified psychedelics as 'Schedule 1 substances', designated as having the highest potential for abuse, and no medical value whatsoever. This anti-psychedelic backlash would last until the late 1990s, a combination of stigma and prohibitive red tape putting off any serious scientist interest. During those decades Amanda Feilding's campaign on behalf of psychedelics – 'the flesh of the gods' – was largely pursued through art, which she admitted was 'an uphill struggle'. It did not help that she was easily characterised as a batty aristocrat, living in her family's triple-moated Tudor hunting lodge, Beckley Park, which lent her pronouncements on legalising drugs a touch of 'de haut en bas'. She was also given to unguarded comments such as: 'I have always considered myself my own best laboratory.' As the Daily Mail once asked: 'Is the countess just an amusing and irrelevant eccentric? Or could she be a real danger to society?' But perhaps the greatest hindrance to her credibility as a drug policy reformer was that, between the 1960s and the 1990s, she had been more visible as a trepanning enthusiast, who in 1970 was filmed in a floral shower cap, boring a hole into her shaven skull with a dentist's drill to create more room for blood to pulse through her brain. She then ate a rare steak to replace the lost iron and went out to a party in Chelsea. The resulting documentary, Heartbeat in the Brain, was later screened in New York, where – as one reviewer put it – the fainting audience members could be seen 'dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums'. Amanda Feilding went on to stand twice for parliament, in 1979 and 1983, on a platform of free trepanation on the NHS, but she was later canny enough to distance herself from the practice, which the new science of brain imaging had failed to support. For the rehabilitation of psychedelics, on the other hand, brain imaging proved a watershed, giving 'you a visual perspective that you can't deny,' she said. Realising that she would have 'to use science as a tool to prove what one was saying was true, not part of a kind of druggy fantasy,' in 1998 Amanda Feilding launched the Beckley Foundation as a 'trojan horse' to infiltrate the establishment. She assembled a board of leading neuroscientists and borrowed her family crest for its double-headed eagle logo, 'to make it look like a college,' she recalled. She converted a 17th-century cowshed knee-deep in manure into the nerve centre of her operation – nicknamed 'World Consciousness House' by her husband Jamie Charteris (Lord Neidpath, and later Earl of Wemyss) – and from it she built the Beckley Foundation into one of the largest organisations campaigning for drug reform around the world. The rarefied atmosphere of Beckley Park lent the organisation a gravitas not ordinarily to be found in drug reform circles. Amanda Feilding was able to give seminars at the House of Lords and in 2011 the foundation's open letter calling for an end to the war on drugs attracted the signatures of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2008 she co-founded the psychedelic research programme at Imperial College London with Professor David Nutt, who shortly afterwards was fired as government drugs czar for observing that alcohol and tobacco did more public harm than LSD, cannabis or ecstasy – a decision Amanda Feilding likened to the Vatican's treatment of Galileo. In 2016 the Beckley/Imperial partnership produced the first ever images of a brain under LSD. It was still hand-to-mouth, but a crowdfunded appeal for £25,000 to process the images met its target within 36 hours. The findings suggested that the drug limited the brain's 'ego' mechanism, known as 'the default mode network', and might be able to rewire the repetitive cycles associated with depression, addictions and obsessive compulsive disorder. That year another Beckley/Imperial study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, became the first of its kind to demonstrate that psilocybin – the LSD-like active ingredient in magic mushrooms – in conjunction with psychotherapy could be effective against treatment-resistant depression. By 2019 US regulators had fast-tracked further research by designating psilocybin a 'breakthrough therapy' for treatment-resistant depression. Despite being, in her own words, 'a female with no letters to my name', Amanda Feilding was widely judged to have contributed to a step change in our understanding of the brain mechanism of psychedelics and in laying the foundations for a new era of clinical research. 'I am very, very happy to be proved wrong,' she said. 'What I want to do is know.' Amanda Claire Marian Feilding was born on January 30 1943, the fourth child of Basil Feilding and his wife – and distant cousin – Margaret (Peggy), née Feilding; both were descended from the Habsburgs, and from two illegitimate children of Charles II. Amanda's early life was reminiscent of I Capture the Castle: money and fuel were forever running out, while she ran wild in the topiaried garden, her greatest delight being to coax laughter out of her private god: 'that kind of orgasm experience that I think a lot of young children have and then forget'. Her father, a great-grandson of both the Earl of Denbigh and the Marquess of Bath, farmed at night so that the day could be free for painting. 'Violent-tempered, very eccentric, charming and mercurial,' he had an anarchist temperament, and advised her: 'Whatever the authorities or the government tells you to do – do the opposite.' The Tudor house, seemingly adrift in a sea of mist, inspired free-thinking, like 'an island outside culture in which you are free to explore,' Amanda recalled. Aldous Huxley was said to have been inspired to write his debut novel Crome Yellow after visiting Beckley Park for tea in 1921. Her own father read to her at bedtime from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Third Eye. There was, Amanda Feilding recalled, 'a deep feeling that one didn't need to follow society because one was slightly above it'. Although her father was an atheist, her mother was a Catholic and sent her to convent school. Amanda abandoned formal education at 16, however, when she won the science prize but the nuns refused her request to be given as a reward a book on Buddhism. With £25 in her pocket she set off for Ceylon to visit the godfather she had never met, a Buddhist monk called Bertie Moore, but lost her passport in Syria and instead lived for a time with the Bedouin. On her return to England she studied comparative religion with an Oxford professor and became an art student at the Slade. Her first encounter with LSD was not auspicious. Michael Hollingshead, an unhinged associate of Timothy O'Leary, spiked her cup of coffee with a thousand-fold dose of acid. She took three months to recover, finally venturing out to go to a party where a Ravi Shankar performance was promised. There she met Bart Huges, a bright young Dutch doctor who converted her to the cause of trepanation and with whom she began controlled experiments with LSD. She lived for a time in a 'threesome' with Huges and another of his disciples, Joe Mellen, who remained her partner for 30 years and the father of her two sons, Rock Basil and Cosmo Birdie. Huges, however, was too vocal about trepanation and found himself on the front page of a Sunday tabloid under the headline: 'This dangerous idiot should be thrown out of the country.' A knock on the door duly came from two burly government officials and Huges was barred from Britain for the remainder of his life. She would have followed him to Holland had it not been for her tame pigeon, Birdie, whom she had saved as a pigeon chick and fed on bits of Weetabix from the end of a paintbrush. They lived together for 15 years, communicated telepathically and were, she said, 'madly in love'. The pigeon would jealously attack her partner Joe Mellen whenever his hands were occupied and he was unable to fight back. Birdie would also peck her on the eyeball but this was, she said, 'how they show love'. 'I have two obviously wonderful children, but this? It was a unique type of love,' she recalled. She was a talented painter, and as well as immortalising Birdie in oils, she earned a living for a time selling hand-coloured prints on the Portobello Road; she and Mellen also ran The Pigeon Hole Gallery in Chelsea. After four years of failing to find a doctor to trepan her, she decided to go it alone. 'I was trained as a sculptor, so I thought, 'I spend all my time making holes in objects, I might as well make one in my own head.'' When asked whether she was scared, she replied: 'Well, skiing is terrifying.' Four hours later she experienced a feeling of peace and an uplifting. 'You remain the same personality, with the same hangups, character defects, et cetera, et cetera,' she observed. 'But we all have our neurotic bag we carry around. I think trepanation, by increasing the brain-blood volume, it lessens that bag.' When in 1995 she married Jamie Charteris, she persuaded him to be trepanned in a Cairo hospital, which he claimed cured him of his lifelong headaches. Amanda Feilding worked 15-hour days for her cause. Among her supporters was the 'father' of LSD, the Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, who was president of the Beckley Foundation until his death in 2008 aged 102, but who lived to see her fulfil her promise to him that she would obtain permission to carry out the first LSD research on human subjects since the early 1970s. Amanda Feilding is survived by her husband, who in 2008 succeeded as 13th Earl of Wemyss and 9th Earl of March, and by her two sons by Joe Mellen. The elder, Rock, is involved with Beckley Retreats, which organises psilocybin retreats; the younger, Cosmo, is CEO of Beckley Psytech, which aims to develop psychedelic medicines for the market, and has received a $50 million investment from the Peter Thiel-backed Atai Life Sciences. Amanda Feilding, born January 30 1943, died May 22 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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