Michael Stone, psychiatrist and scholar who studied evil, dies at age 90

Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist and scientist who sought to define evil and distinguish its manifestations from the typical behavior of people with mental illness, died on December 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

The cause was complications from a stroke he suffered in January, his son David said.

Dr. Stone was best known to the public as the author of the book “The Anatomy of Evil” (2009) and as the host from 2006 to 2008 of the television program “Most Evil”, for which he interviewed people imprisoned for murder. determine what motivated them to participate in a malicious criminal act.

He ranked the acts on a 22-category scale of his creation. Modeled on Dante’s nine circles of hell, his taxonomic scale ranged from justifiable homicide to murders committed by people whose primary motivation was to torture their victims.

Only humans are capable of evil, wrote Dr. Stone in ‘The Anatomy of Evil’, although evil is not a trait people are born with. He recognized that although acts of evil were difficult to define, the word “evil” was derived from “over” or “beyond,” and could apply to “certain acts done by people who clearly intended to harm others or to kill in an unbearable way. painful way.”

For an act to be evil, he wrote, it must be “breathtakingly horrible” and premeditated, cause “excessive” suffering and “seem incomprehensible and baffling, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.”

“Mike’s most important contribution to psychiatry was to sharpen the distinction between mental illness and evil,” Dr. Allen Frances. said a former student of Dr. Stone, who is now chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., in a telephone interview.

“The problem,” said Dr. Frances, “is that with every mass murderer, every crazy politician, every serial killer, the first trend in public opinion and the media is that he is mentally ill.” Dr. Stone, he said, helped change this default position.

By analyzing the biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, Dr. Stone two predominant personality traits: narcissism, to the point of having little or no ability to care for their victims; and aggression, in terms of exercising power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering and death.

In “The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime” (2019), a sequel to Dr. Stone in 2009, he and Dr. Gary Brucato that there has been an “undeniable intensification and diversification” of evil since the 1960s. acts committed primarily by criminals who are “not ‘sick’ in the psychiatric and legal sense, but rather psychopathic and morally depraved.”

The reasons, they wrote, included greater civilian access to military weapons; the reduction of both individual and personal responsibility as preached by fascist and communist governments earlier in the 20th century; sexual liberation, which loosened other inhibitions; the ease of communication on mobile phones and the Internet; the rise of moral relativism; and a reaction against feminism.

In 2000, Dr. Stone played a role in a sensational murder case that tested the boundaries of doctor-patient confidentiality. He wanted to testify in the murder trial of Robert Bierenbaum, a plastic surgeon and former patient of his, who was accused of killing his wife, Gail Katz-Bierenbaum, in 1985.

Dr. Stone had written a letter to his patient’s wife two years before her death, advising her to live separately from her husband for her own safety. He asked her to sign it and send it back, but she never did. With his permission, he had also contacted Dr.’s parents. Bierenbaum.

The judge ultimately excluded Dr. Stone opted out of the trial on the basis of professional secrecy. But the testimony of several other witnesses about the letter contributed to Dr. Bierenbaum.

Michael Howard Stone was born on October 27, 1933 in Syracuse, NY, the grandson of Eastern European immigrants. His father, Moses Howard Stone, owned a paper wholesale business. His mother, Corinne (Gittleman) Stone, was a homemaker.

He was a child prodigy who learned Latin and Greek as a child. He was only ten years old when he entered seventh grade. As the youngest and smallest student in the school, and also the only Jewish one, he formed an alliance with a 17-year-old classmate who was a boxer. His son David said: Mike would do the classmate’s homework, and the classmate would protect him from local anti-Semitic bullies.

He entered Cornell University in Ithaca, New York at age 16, where he enrolled in a pre-medical curriculum but double majored in classics in case he was rejected by medical schools that had already met their quota of Jewish students had fulfilled. He enrolled at Cornell Medical School in Manhattan after graduating from Cornell in 1954 and received his medical degree in 1958.

He originally studied hematology and cancer chemotherapy at the Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan, but his mother’s chronic pain disorder led him to switch to neurology and eventually psychiatry. He did his residency at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he met Dr. Clarice Kestenbaum, whom he married in 1965.

He is survived by two sons, David and John Stone, from that marriage, which ended in divorce in 1978; his wife, Beth Eichstaedt; his stepchildren, Wendy Turner and Thomas Penders; three grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

Dr. Stone spoke sixteen languages ​​and, like a relic from another era, habitually wore three-piece suits. He was known for his mischievous sense of humor: his latest book, ‘The Funny Bone’, published this year, is a collection of his cartoons, jokes and poems.

As an amateur carpenter, he built the shelves that housed his library of 11,000 books. His collection included about sixty books on Hitler – further evidence, like his memories of childhood bullying, of his desire to define evil.

As a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and long-time professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Stone also conducted a long-term study of patients with borderline personality disorders, including those who had considered suicide. He concluded that, often as a result of therapy and other treatments, the condition of about two-thirds of them had improved significantly some 25 years later.

In “The New Evil,” Dr. Stone and Dr. Brucato offered a possible explanation for why “particularly heinous and spectacular crimes,” especially those committed in America and by men, had been on the rise since the 1960s. They warned of “the emergence of a kind of ‘false compassion’ in which the most ruthless, psychopathic individuals are sometimes seen as ‘victims’.”

The two concluded with a well-known metaphor: a frog dropped into a pot of boiling water will immediately try to escape; but if placed in cold water that is gradually heated, the frog will remain complacent until it is too late.

“It is our fervent hope that, after a period of terrible growing pains, our culture will eventually learn that true power and control come only after a lifelong process of controlling and inhibiting the self,” they wrote. “Maybe as a first step we should admit that the water in our collective pot is getting alarmingly warmer every day.”