Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness

This classic text on the nature of deviance, originally published in 1980, is now reissued with a new Afterword by the authors. In this new edition of their award-winning book, Conrad and Schneider investigate the origins and contemporary consequences of the medicalization of deviance. They examine specific cases — madness, alcoholism, opiate addiction, homosexuality, delinquency, and child abuse — and draw out their theoretical and policy implications. In a new chapter, the authors address developments in the last decade — including AIDS, domestic violence, co-dependency, hyperactivity in children, and learning disabilities — and they discuss the fate of medicalization in the 1990s with the changes in medicine and continued restrictions on social services.

• Author
• Peter Conrad, Joseph W. Schneider

• Format
• paperback

• Pages
• 263

• Publisher
• Temple University Press

• Language
• english

• ISBN
• 9780877229995

• Genres
• sociology

• Release date
• 1992