“ What each culture views as the cause of madness is dependent on its world view. ”
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.
~ Peter Conrad
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.
...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...
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.
