Alan A. Stone


Alan Abraham Stone is the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry at the Harvard Law School. His writing and teaching has focused on professional medical ethics, issues at the intersection of law and psychiatry, and the topic of violence in both law and in psychiatry. Stone served as president of the American Psychiatric Association. He also served for a number of years as the film critic for the Boston Review.

Personal life

Stone graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he majored in psychology and played on the Varsity Football team . He studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and earned his M.D. from Yale Medical School in 1955. He pursued his joint interest in the intersection of law, psychology, and psychiatry first as a lecturer at Harvard Law School in 1969, and later through a joint appointment with Harvard Medical School in 1972. In 1978, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He later lectured at Stanford before returning to Harvard.

Work

Stone's work often explores the intersection between psychiatry, ethics, and law. He wrote about decisions in psychotherapy in managed care, and about psychiatric treatment of oppressed minorities such as the Falun Gong and Soviet Jews. In 2002, he asserted that it was time for psychiatry in the Western countries to reconsider accounts of political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR and in China.
Stone believed that Andrei Snezhnevsky was wrongly condemned by critics. According to Stone, one of the first points made by Soviet psychiatrists condemned for unethical political abuse of psychiatry, was that the revolution is the greatest good for the greatest number, the greatest piece of social justice, and the greatest beneficence imaginable in the twentieth century. In the Western view, the ethical compass of Soviet psychiatrists began to wander when they acted in the service of this greatest beneficence.

Publications

Books
Articles