Amanda Feilding’s Early Life
Amanda Feilding, the well-known founder of the Beckley Foundation, is the notable social worker I chose for analysis. Her father owned Beckley Park, a Tudor hunting estate with three towers and three moats outside of Oxford with three towers and three moats. Her interest in mysticism and altered states of Consciousness began at an early age. Amanda Feilding is a research coordinator, English drug policy reformer, and lobbyist born in 1943. She established the Foundation to further Consciousness in 1998, eventually changing its name to the Beckley Foundation (Balázs et al.10). In addition to funding, directing, and initiating clinical and neuroscientific research on psychoactive substances’ effects on the brain, this charity trust engages in research on cognition and psychoactive substances. Feilding became interested in mysticism and altered states of Consciousness at a young age. With just £25 in her pocket, she left at 16 for Ceylon, where her godfather, Bertie Moore, had converted to Buddhism (Abendstern 18). Feilding attempted to reach Ceylon by hitchhiking as far as the Syrian border, but she was unsuccessful. Prior to departing for the UK, she lived among Bedouins for a short period of time. Later, Feilding studied comparative religions and mysticism with Professor Zaehner and classical Arabic with Professor Albert Hourani (Feilding 68). In the later stages of her education, she concentrated on physiology, altered states of Consciousness, psychology, and ultimately, neuroscience.
Social Welfare Issue
Her pioneering research on psychedelics and her ground-breaking projects earned her the title “Queen of Consciousness” during the decade (Gonzalez et al. 1160). Some of the studies that stand out include psilocybin’s effectiveness in helping smokers quit and those who suffer from depression, cannabis’s effect on creativity and the significance of THC/CBD ratios in mental health, the first study on the effects of LSD on the brain using brain imaging, and others. (Abendstern et al. 9). The resurgence of psychedelic science has been credited to Amanda Feilding as the “hidden hand.” She has made a significant and well-recognized contribution to the global drug policy reform movement. At the height of the first wave of psychedelic research, in the middle of the 1960s, Amanda was first exposed to LSD (Szigeti et al. 62878). She rapidly realized its transforming and therapeutic effect after being impressed by its ability to elicit mystical states of Consciousness and heighten creativity. She was motivated by her experiences to research the mechanics underlying psychedelic drugs’ effects and devote her time to finding ways to harness their potential to improve health and cure disease.
Key Claim to Fame
In 1970, Feilding made headlines when she used a dental drill to trepanation herself. Heartbeat in the Brain is a short cult art film she created on the event. In her 20s, Feilding also started giving herself LSD microdoses (Carhart-Harris et al. 4853). It’s fair to say that her long history of self-experimentation hasn’t always benefited her credibility as an advocate. Her research on the results of various awareness-raising techniques included trepanation. In her book Blood and Awareness, she also went into length on the idea that the “personality” functions as an accustomed reflex mechanism that controls blood flow in the brain at this moment and that blood and cerebrospinal fluid ratio changes are what cause changes in Consciousness (Buchborn et al. 789). In the 1970s and 1980s, she painted conceptual works on Consciousness and displayed them at the ICA in London, PS1 in New York, and other US exhibitions (Feilding 68). As part of his work on drug policy reform, Fielding developed a framework for establishing new policies based on evidence that considered both the advantages and risks. Feilding established the Global Cannabis Commission in 2007, and a group of leading authorities on drug policy produced a report as a result (Kaelen et al. 509).
Publications of Amanda Feilding
More than 50 of her co-authored publications have been published in scholarly journals. Abendstern claims that more than 50 of Amanda Fielding’s peer-reviewed journal publications deal with treating mental illness and investigating methods to foster creativity and well-being (25). A procedure employed by various cultures to treat mental illness, trepanning, has also been used by Fielding in a study to ascertain the cognitive effects of cannabis. For the benefit of the person and society, Feilding has a long-standing interest in studying awareness (Bonnelle et al., 2049). She has backed studies into various techniques for changing Consciousness, including trepanation, psychotropic drug use, and meditation.
What Amanda is doing
She started several innovative research projects. The effectiveness of psilocybin as a treatment for depression and nicotine addiction must be examined in conjunction with psychotherapy, brain imaging studies must be conducted to evaluate how psilocybin affects cerebral blood flow, and cannabis must be studied to determine whether it affects creativity. (Moore and Feilding n. p). In addition to his involvement in drug policy reform, Fielding initiated the first effort to build an evidence base on which new policies could be based, asserting that both advantages and risks should be weighed. In order to outline a plan for future changes to cannabis control legislation on a national and international level, a group of leading experts on drug policy created the Global Cannabis Commission, which Feilding formed.
Work Cited
Abendstern, Michele, et al. “The social worker in community mental health teams: Findings from a national survey.” Journal of Social Work 22.1 (2022): 4-25. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468017320979932
Balázs, Szigeti, et al. “Self-blinding citizen science to explore psychedelic microdosing.” eLife (2021). 10 https://www.proquest.com/openview/b99dac34a8dd1d5725a0491c3a7a3245/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=2045579#:~:text=DOI%3A10.7554/eLife.62878
Bonnelle, Valerie, et al. “Analgesic potential of macrodoses and microdoses of classical psychedelics in chronic pain sufferers: a population survey.” British Journal of Pain (2022): 2049. https://doi.org/10.1177/20494637221114962
Buchborn, Tobias, et al. “The serotonin 2A receptor agonist 25CN-NBOH increases murine heart rate and neck-arterial blood flow in a temperature-dependent manner.” Journal of Psychopharmacology 34.7 (2020): 786-794.
Carhart-Harris, Robin L., et al. “Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113.17 (2016): 4853–4858. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518377113
Feilding, Amanda, ed. Hofmann’s Elixir: LSD and the the New Eleusis. MIT Press, 2020. 68
González, Débora, et al. “Therapeutic potential of ayahuasca in grief: a prospective, observational study.” Psychopharmacology 237.4 (2020): 1171-1182. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-019-05446-2
Kaelen, Mendel, et al. “The hidden therapist: evidence for a central role of music in psychedelic therapy.” Psychopharmacology 235.2 (2018): 505-519. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-017-4820-5
Moore, K., H. Wells, and A. Feilding. “Roadmaps to regulation: MDMA.” (2019).
Szigeti, Balázs, et al. “Self-blinding citizen science to explore psychedelic microdosing.” Elife 10 (2021): 62878. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62878
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