Jane Murphy Leighton, Ph.D.

Jane Murphy Leighton was born in Denver, Colorado, October 9,1929. She received a B.A. degree from Phillips University in 1951 and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1960. She is Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Professor in Epidemiology , Harvard School of Public Health, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry Dalhousie Faculty of Medicine, and Chief of Psychiatric Epiemiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Murphy joined the Stirling County Study as an Administrator and researcher in 1951. Thereafter she became a graduate student in the department of Anthropology and Sociology at Cornell University and, for her Ph.D. dissertation, she spent a year living with Eskimos of Alaska to learn their concept of mental illness. Her other cross-cultural studies were carried out in Nigeria and Vietnam and together they indicated that there was much more similarity than difference among these groups of people . Not only were their views of mental illness similar but also the proportions of people whose lives were so afflicted were generally similar.

In 1966, Drs. Murphy and Leighton were married and they moved from Cornell to the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Murphy served as the Senior Social Scientist for the Stirling County Study and was in charge of the extensionof the study carried out during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While she has continued to make contributions to the literature on cross-cultural psychiatry, she has turned most of her attention to the long term study in Stirling County.

In 1975 when Dr. Leighton retired from the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Murphy became the director of the Stirling County Study and designed the work so that, in bringing the study to a 40-year mark, it would be possible to trace historical trends regarding the prevalence of different types of mental illnesses. The study involves three main surveys of adults who were selected as samples to represent the County, first in 1952, at a mid-point in 1970, and recently in 1992. The eldest person in the first survey had been born in 1864 and the youngest person in the most recent survey was born in 1974. Using a combination of traditional and newer methods, current analysis indicates that the prevalence of depression has remained about 5% throughout the years and that this rate is typical of most populations in North America. Key findings are that untreated depression is associated with situations of chronic stress and is more serious in reducing both the quality and quantity of life than had previously been realized.

Dr. Murphy serves 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 is a recipient of a Rema Lapouse Award from the American Public Health Association.

*Taken from "The Isaiah W. Wilson Commemorative Display" located at the Isaiah W. Wilson Memorial Library in Digby.

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