Fonds MS-13-86 - Alexander Leighton and Jane Murphy fonds

Jane Murphy was a professor and pioneering psychiatric epidemiologist who, from 1975 until her death in 2021, led the Stirling County Study, initiated in 1948 by her late husband Alexander Leighton. She was born on 9 October 1929 in Denver, Colorado, received a BA from Phillips University in 1951 and a PhD from Cornell University in 1960. In 1951 she joined the Stirling County Study as an administrator and researcher, followed by graduate studies in anthropology and sociology at Cornell University. During her PhD research, she lived with indigenous peoples in Alaska to learn about their concept of mental illness, and carried out cross-cultural studies in Nigeria and Vietnam.

In 1966 she married Alexander H. Leighton and together they continued and extended the seminal Stirling County Study in psychiatric epidemiology, the longest running study of its kind to understand the prevalence and types of mental illness across generations in a cross-cultural community. She served as the Senior Social Scientist for the Study and was in charge of its extension during the late 1960s and early 1970s. After Dr. Leighton's retirement from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1975, Jane Murphy became the director and designed the study so that on reaching the 40-year mark, it would be possible to trace historical trends regarding the prevalence of different types of mental illnesses. Murphy served as director of the study from 1975 until her death in 2021. She taught in the psychiatric epidemiology program at the Harvard Chan School from 1996-201; directed the Psychiatric Epidemiology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital; was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School; and served as an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Dalhousie University.

Widely published, Jane Murphy made contributions to the literature on cross-cultural psychiatry, the prevalence of depression in communities, and continuities in community-based psychiatric epidemiology. She served on the Executive Committee of a section of the World Psychiatric Association and on the Council of the Association for Clinical and Psychosocial Research. She was a recipient of a Rema Lapouse Award from the American Public Health Association and the Harvard Award in Psychiatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Jane Murphy and Alexander Leighton enjoyed a long association with Digby County, Nova Scotia, and helped make local history more available to the public through the Wilson Collier Committee, which focuses on identifying, preserving and connecting historical writings and photographs of the Bay of Fundy as well as the stories and lives of the people who live there.

Alexander H. Leighton was a sociologist and psychologist and the lead researcher of the seminal Stirling County Study in psychiatric epidemiology, the longest running study of its kind to understand the prevalence and types of mental illness across generations in a cross-cultural community. Born on 17 July 1908 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he received a BA from Princeton University (1932), an MSc from Cambridge University (1934), and an MD from Johns Hopkins Medical School (1936). He held professorial appointments in both the departments of psychiatry and community health and epidemiology at Dalhousie University, as well as in sociology and anthropology at Cornell, and he was professor emeritus at Harvard. He also served on multiple advisory committees for the governments of Canada and the United States and for the World Health Organization, and over his lifetime received a multitude of awards and honours. He died in 2007.

In 1948 Leighton initiated the first of the post-war studies of the distribution and prevalence of mental illness in a general population. The Stirling County Study is still active and from Leighton's retirement from Harvard University in 1975, it was directed by his wife and research partner, Dr. Jane Murphy Leighton. One of its initial findings in Nova Scotia, was that one in five adults experiences mental illness, most commonly depression, anxiety and/or alcohol abuse. Similar studies were carried out in other settings, including New York City, Alaska, Nigeria and Vietnam. Other investigations of this type now number in the hundreds and have been conducted across the world.