Alec Buchanan

Alec Buchanan was a professor of psychiatry in the Law and Psychiatry Division of the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry before joining the emeritus faculty in 2024. He graduated in medicine in Edinburgh, graduating in 1981, and worked as a doctor in Papua New Guinea before training in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London. He then undertook a PhD in criminology and a specialist clinical training in forensic psychiatry. As a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Forensic Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London in the 1990s and early 2000s, his academic and clinical work included investigating the links between delusions and behavior, treating mentally disordered offenders in community settings and providing clinical services to defendants appearing at a local court. He moved to Yale in 2002. Since then, in addition to teaching and publishing research, he has provided forensic psychiatry services to Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health and to the Veterans Administration. His books include edited volumes on the treatment of the mentally disordered offender in the community and on the provision of psychiatric reports for the courts, the latter winning the Guttmacher Award of the American Psychiatric Association. He is a past editor of the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry. His empirical and theoretical publications concern the links between mental disorder and violence and the relevance of mental disorders to criminal legal outcomes, including sentencing.