ABSTRACT
An increasing amount of deviant behavior is being conceptualized as illness in a medical framework. The general conceptual framework is the labeling or societal reaction approach to deviance. There has been recent notice of the increasing medicalization of deviant behavior and the medical institution's expanding role as an agent of social control. This chapter focuses on the empirical analysis of the process of medicalization. It examines how deviant behavior gets defined and treated as a medical problem; specifically, how children who exhibit certain types of deviant behavior become labeled as hyperactive. Since Talcott Parsons' seminal essay conceptualizing illness as deviance in the development of his sick role theory, there have been a number of fruitful considerations of the relation of illness to social deviance. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
