RESOURCE FILES Chapter 7 Constructing Difference: Social Deviance
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. |
