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Book cover of Deviance and Medicalization

Deviance and Medicalization

From Badness to Sickness

by Peter Conrad, Joseph W. Schneider · 1992

ISBN: 0877229996 9780877229995

Category: Medical / Health Care Delivery

Page count: 327

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.