Dr. Stephen M. Stahl received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Northwestern University in Chicago, as a member of the Honors Program in Medical Education, and his Ph.D. degree in pharmacology and physiology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Stahl has trained in three specialties: internal medicine at the University of Chicago; neurology at the University of California in San Francisco; and psychiatry at Stanford University. He is board certified in psychiatry.
Dr. Stahl has held faculty positions at Stanford University, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Institute of Psychiatry London, the Institute of Neurology London, and, currently, as professor at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and as an Honorary Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He also directs psychopharmacology services and academic programs for the eight-facility, 6500 patient California Department of State Hospital System, where he also heads their assessment and treatment efforts to reduce violence. Dr. Stahl was formerly Executive Director of Clinical Neurosciences at the Merck Neuroscience Research Center in the UK for several years. Dr. Stahl’s major interests are dedicated to producing and disseminating educational information about diseases and their treatments in psychiatry and neurology, with a special emphasis on multimedia, the internet and teaching how to teach.
Dr. Stahl currently serves as editor-in-chief of CNS Spectrums. He is also past associate editor of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, former clinical field editor for the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology and is currently on numerous editorial boards of other leading journals including the ACNP’s journal Neuropsychopharmacology. He has conducted numerous research projects during his career awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), by the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and by the pharmaceutical industry. Author of over 500 articles and chapters, and more than 1600 scientific presentations and abstracts, Dr. Stahl is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, and teacher in psychiatry with subspecialty expertise in psychopharmacology. Dr. Stahl has written 35 books and edited 12 others, including the best-selling and award-winning textbook, Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology, now in its fourth edition, the best-selling and award-winning clinical manual, Essential Psychopharmacology Prescriber's Guide, now in its sixth edition.
Lectures, courses, and preceptorships based upon his textbooks have taken him to dozens of countries on 6 continents to speak to tens of thousands of physicians, mental health professionals and students at all levels. His lectures and scientific presentations have been distributed as more than a million CD-ROMs, internet educational programs, videotapes, audiotapes, and programmed home study texts for continuing medical education to hundreds of thousands of professionals in many different languages. His courses and award-winning multimedia teaching materials are used by psychopharmacology teachers and students throughout the world.
Dr. Stahl serves as a fellow of the ACNP (American College of Neuro-psychopharmacology), of the British Association of Psychopharmacology (BAP) and of the CINP, where he was formerly vice president and is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). He also has served on numerous medical and scientific advisory boards for the pharmaceutical industry, for the biotechnology and medical information industry, and for various nonprofit and public service organizations, including appointment by the State of California and past Chair of the Medi-Cal Oversight Board for Medicines (Drug Utilization Review Board).
His educational research programs are monitoring changes in diagnosing and prescribing behaviors as outcomes from various educational interventions for programs organized by the Neuroscience Education Institute, which he chairs. He also has an active clinical practice specializing in psychopharmacologic treatment of resistant cases.
He has been awarded the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP) Lundbeck Foundation Award in Education for his contributions to postgraduate education in psychiatry and neurology. His books have won the British Medical Association’s Book of the Year Award and Arbor Scientia has been awarded the business of the year award from the local chamber of commerce. Dr. Stahl is also the winner of the A.E. Bennett Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, the APA/San Diego Psychiatric Society Education Award, the UCSD department of psychiatry residency teaching award, and has been cited as both one of “America’s Top Psychiatrists” and one of the “Best Doctors in America.” He was honored with the Distinguished Psychiatrist Award of the APA and gave the Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecture for 2013. Recently, his alma mater Northwestern University honored him by naming their annual award for the best medical student going into psychiatry the Stephen Stahl award. Dr. Stahl was named the 2016 David A Mrazek Memorial Award Winner by the American Psychiatric Association and delivered the Mrazek Lecture at the annual meeting of the APA.