Alan A. Stone

Alan Abraham Stone (August 15, 1929 – January 23, 2022) was an American psychiatrist who was the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law and Psychiatry Emeritus at 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. He also served for a number of years as the film critic for the Boston Review.

Biography Stone was born on August 15, 1929, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Julius and Betty Stone. His parents were both from Jewish-Lithuanian families. Julius Stone was a lawyer, and later a judge. 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.

Stone married Sue Smart, with whom he had three children, Karen, David, and Douglas. Karen died in 1988, and Sue died in 1996. He was later romantically involved with Laura Maslow-Armand, to the end of his life, though they never married. 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. In the Western view, the ethical compass of Soviet psychiatrists began to wander when they acted in the service of this greatest beneficence. A model state law on civil commitment of the mentally ill. (1983) Law, science, and psychiatric malpractice: a response to Klerman's indictment of psychoanalytic psychiatry (1990)