Alan Stone

Amateur psychoanalysts have put Donald Trump on the couch, calling him a sociopath, unhinged, a narcissist. Amid all this psych-talk, there is one group of people who aren't talking as much: the professionals. Or at least they're not supposed to. Professional ethics dictate that psychiatrists and psychologists avoid publicly analyzing or diagnosing someone they've never examined, but there is new and unusually vocal dissension against this long-held gag rule because of what some of them think they hear and see in Trump...In 1973, the psychiatry association adopted the Goldwater rule. Dr. Alan Stone, a professor of psychiatry and the law at Harvard, was the lone board member to vote against it. "I believe in free speech," Stone said. "If psychiatrists want to make fools of themselves, they have that right."

Law enforcement officials seem in no hurry to confront a group of armed antigovernment protesters occupying a federally owned wildlife refuge in Oregon this week – a clear shift from tactics used during previous, sometimes deadly encounters. Here are four armed confrontations in recent times, and the ways in which the authorities responded. ... A Harvard professor of law and psychiatry, Dr. Alan A. Stone, took the F.B.I. to task in a report to the Justice Department in November 1993. An apocalyptic sect like the Branch Davidians should not have been handled as if it would “submit to tactical pressure,” Dr. Stone wrote. Government agents sought to prove to Mr. Koresh that they were in control. Instead, Dr. Stone said, they drove him to the “ultimate act of control — destruction of himself and his group.”