RESOURCE FILES
Chapter 7
Constructing Difference: Social Deviance
Power, Deviance, and Insanity
The conflict
perspective, which is concerned in large part with the way that power influences social
life, can help us understand how societies came to favor institutionalizing the
"insane."
Prior to the
17th century, people who were "insane" were not necessarily separated from the
general population. Like poor people and other "undesirables," they freely
roamed the countryside. Responsibility for their care rested with the family or the local
community. Madness at the time was a public matter, out in the open and part of everyday
life. As long as mentally ill people weren't dangerous, they weren't considered
particularly troublesome.
As cities
began to grow, so did the population of roaming vagrants and mad people. Their presence
and visibility became increasingly bothersome to the rest of the population. In 1657 King
Louis XIII of France issued a royal decree forbidding all people from begging on the
streets of Paris.
It wasn't
long before the French army began to hunt down street people and herd them into an
institution euphemistically called the "Hopital General."1
There, mad people were confined with beggars, vagabonds, street thieves, the poor, the
unemployed, and anybody else who could not support himself or herself. At its peak the
hospital held an estimated 1% of the entire population of Paris.2
The General
Hospital wasn't the kind of hospital we have today. It had no medical treatments, doctors,
nurses, or medical equipment. It was more like a pauper's prison that symbolically
represented society's distaste for idleness and laziness.
More
important, the General Hospital served the interests of the growing ruling class of
landowners, merchants, and businesspeople. In periods of economic prosperity, the
inhabitants of the hospital provided a limitless pool of cheap labor. In slow economic
times, the hospital reabsorbed these individuals so they wouldn't be a nuisance to the
more affluent citizens.
As capitalism
began to flourish and the need for a competent workforce increased, the ruling class
thought it best to separate the hospital inhabitants who could work from those who
couldn't (that is, the insane). A more specialized institution, the madhouse, was
established to house only the insane. This separation occurred not to provide the insane
with more effective psychiatric treatment but to protect others from the
"contagion" of madness.3 Their presence
disrupted the reserve labor pool, so they had to be segregated.
The madhouse
quickly grew in popularity, evolving into the more humanitarian insane asylum of the 19th
century and the more therapeutic mental hospital of the 20th century. Thus, a new deviant
category (the insane) and a new way of dealing with them (confinement in specialized
institutions) were created by the state, primarily for economic and social reasons.4
1Foucault, M. 1965. Madness and civilization. New York:
Vintage.
2Conrad, P., & Schneider, J. W. 1980. Deviance and
medicalization: From badness to sickness. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby.
3Foucault, M. 1965. Madness and civilization. New York:
Vintage.
4Chambliss, W. 1974. ÒThe state, the law and the definition
of behavior as criminal or delinquent.Ó In D. Glaser (Ed.), The handbook of criminology.
Chicago: Rand McNally.
David Newman and Rebecca Smith.
(Created October 7, 1999). Copyright Pine Forge Press.
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