Name Alan Stone | ||
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Education Harvard College (1955), Yale School of Medicine (1950) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, US & Canada Books Law - psychiatry - and mora, Movies and the Moral Adventur, Longitudinal studies of child pers, The abnormal personalit, Mental health and law | ||
Alan Abraham Stone (born 1929) is a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University. Stone also maintains an interest in cinema, and has served for a number of years as the film critic for the Boston Review.
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Personal life
Stone graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he majored in psychology and played on the Varsity Football team []. He 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, before earning a joint appointment with Harvard Medical School three years later. In 1978, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Revisionist views
In his article of 2002, Stone, who as a member of team had examined Soviet dissident Pyotr Grigorenko and found him mentally healthy in 1979, disregarded the findings of the World Psychiatric Association and the later avowal of Soviet psychiatrists themselves and put forward the academically revisionist theory that there was no political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. He asserted that it was time for psychiatry in the Western countries to reconsider the supposedly documented accounts of political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR in the hope of discovering that Soviet psychiatrists were more deserving of sympathy than condemnation. In Stone's words, he believes that Andrei Snezhnevsky was wrongly condemned by critics. According to Stone, one of the first points the Soviet psychiatrists who have been condemned for unethical political abuse of psychiatry make is 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 the Soviet psychiatrists begins to wander when they act in the service of this greatest beneficence.