Alan A. Stone

Alan Abraham Stone (born 1929)[1] is a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University. Stone also maintains an interest in cinema, and serves as the film critic for the Boston Review.

He graduated from Harvard College in 1950 with a degree in psychology, and earned his M.D. from Yale Medical School in 1955. Becoming interested in the intersection of law, psychology, and psychiatry, he first earned a position as 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,[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] In Stone's words, he believes that Andrei Snezhnevsky was wrongly condemned by critics.[4] 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.[5][6] In the Western view, the ethical compass of the Soviet psychiatrists begins to wander when they act in the service of this greatest beneficence.[5][6]

Works

References

  1. ↑ VIAF: "Stone, Alan Abraham"
  2. ↑ Abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union: hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, House of Representatives, Ninety-eighth Congress, first session, September 20, 1983. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1984. p. 74.
  3. ↑ Munro, Robin (2002). "On the Psychiatric Abuse of Falun Gong and Other Dissenters in China: A Reply to Stone, Hickling, Kleinman,and Lee". The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 30 (2): 266–274. PMID 12108564.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Stone, Alan (2002). "Psychiatrists on the side of the angels: the Falun Gong and Soviet Jewry". The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 30 (1): 107–111. PMID 11931357.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Stone, Alan (1984). "The Ethical Boundaries of Forensic Psychiatry: A View from the Ivory Tower". Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 12 (3): 209–219. PMID 6478062.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Stone, Alan (June 2008). "The Ethical Boundaries of Forensic Psychiatry: A View from the Ivory Tower". The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 36 (2): 167–174. PMID 18583690.

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