Alexander H. Leighton (July 17, 1908 – August 11, 2007) was a sociologist and psychiatrist of dual citizenship (United States, by birth, and Canada, from 1975).
[2] His sister was Gertrude Catherine Kerr Leighton (1914-1996), a specialist in international law and psychiatry.
He left Cornell to work at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he was professor of social psychiatry and head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences until 1975.
He left Harvard to become the Canadian National Health Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he stayed for 10 years.
He served on advisory committees for the governments of Canada and the United States and for the World Health Organization.
The study is notable, among other things, for demonstrating that "the prevalence of depression has remained about 5% throughout the years and that this rate is typical of most populations in North America.