Alan A Stone

Alan Abraham Stone (August 15, 1929 – January 23, 2022) was an American psychiatrist and the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry Emeritus at Harvard Law School. His work focused on professional medical ethics, law-psychiatry intersections, and violence in both fields. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association and was a film critic for the Boston Review. Born in Boston to Jewish-Lithuanian parents, Stone graduated from Harvard College in 1950 with a psychology major and played varsity football. He studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and earned his M.D. from Yale Medical School in 1955. His academic career began as a lecturer at Harvard Law School in 1969, followed by a joint appointment with Harvard Medical School in 1972. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 and later taught at Stanford before returning to Harvard. Stone married Sue Smart, with whom he had three children; Karen died in 1988, and Sue in 1996. He was romantically involved with Laura Maslow-Armand until his death. Stone passed away from laryngeal cancer on January 23, 2022, at age 92. His work explored psychiatry, ethics, and law, addressing topics like psychotherapy in managed care and the treatment of oppressed minorities such as Falun Gong and Soviet Jews. In 2002, he argued that Western psychiatry should reconsider its view of political abuse cases in the USSR and China. Stone defended Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky against criticism, asserting that Soviet psychiatrists acted in service of social justice. Stone opposed using psychiatry for political purposes ...