Leighton, Alexander H.

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.