Alan A. Stone, who used his tenures at Harvard’s law and medical schools to influence the evolution of psychiatric ethics over the last half-century, died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 92.

Dr. Stone trained as a psychiatrist and as a psychoanalyst and began teaching in the late 1960s, just as the foundations of both fields were coming under scrutiny. He was at the forefront of questions about how psychiatry is used as a tool of public policy; for example, he criticized the role psychiatrists played in laws that banned abortion based on claims about a woman’s mental health, and in the involuntary commitment of millions of Americans to public mental institutions.

As psychiatrists began to build careers as expert witnesses in criminal trials, he made enemies by opposing the practice. That didn’t stop him from becoming the president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1979, the New York Times pointed out, a post where, among other things, he guided the decision to remove homosexuality from the profession’s list of mental disorders.