Peter Conrad (sociologist)

Peter Conrad (12 April 1945 – 3 March 2024) was an American medical sociologist who has researched and published on numerous topics including ADHD, the medicalization of deviance, the experience of illness, wellness in the workplace, genetics in the news, and biomedical enhancements. Quotes Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (1980, '92) (with Joseph W. Schneider) A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control. Ch. 1: "Deviance, Definitions, and the Medical Profession" The phenomenological perspective views deviance designations as . . . typifications . . . that are products of social interaction and central in our interpretation of the world. "Reality" is defined not as something that exists "out there" for the scientist or anyone else to discover but as a social construction that emerges from and is sustained by social interaction. Ch. 2: "From Badness to Sickness" Public "facts" are not like pebbles on the beach, lying in the sun and waiting to be seen. They must instead be picked, polished, shaped and packaged. Finally ready for display they the bear the marks of their shapers. Ch. 2 When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society. Ch. 2 Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions — products of our own creation. Ch. 2 Medical treatments for deviant behavior are heralded frequently as examples of the "progress" typical of modem society, believed to unfold in a linear fashion, leaving beneficial advances in its wake. . . . But social change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population. Ch. 2 What each culture views as the cause of madness is dependent on its world view. Ch. 3: "Medical Model of Madness" External links Category:Sociologists from the United States Category:1945 births Category:2024 deaths