Michael H. Stone (October 27, 1933 – December 6, 2023) was an American psychiatrist and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.
Stone's work lent support to the need for flexibility in the therapeutic approach to treating borderline personality disorder, as advocated by Drs.
In 2017, the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry awarded him for a paper describing treatment recommendations for persons with this condition.
According to Stone, "evil" acts are generally shocking and horrible, bewildering, and premeditated, and involve wildly excessive degrees of suffering.
His scale, which distinguished acts with more "human" motivations, such as crimes of self-defense and passion, from violence associated with various degrees of psychopathy and sadism, was formally described in his 2009 book The Anatomy of Evil in 2009[4] and further delineated alongside clinical psychologist Dr. Gary Brucato in its follow-up volume, The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime,[5] in 2019.