Delinquent from Latin delinquens is a person committing a misdemeanor, an offender, a term used to refer to persons with socially deviant behavior (criminals, etc.). This term in sociology most often refers to various forms of negative behavior of individuals, the sphere of moral vices, deviations from principles, norms of morality and law. The main forms of deviant behavior include delinquency, including crime, drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution, and suicide.
Numerous forms of deviant behavior indicate a state of conflict between personal and public interests. Deviant behavior is most often an attempt to leave society, to escape from everyday life's hardships and problems, to overcome a state of insecurity and tension through certain compensatory forms. However, deviant behavior is not always negative. It may be associated with the desire of the individual for a new, advanced, an attempt to overcome the conservative, which prevents moving forward. Various types of scientific, technical and artistic creativity can be attributed to deviant behavior.
1. The concept of delinquent behavior
The most urgent problems of the current state of mental culture of the population are caused by a sharp increase in information and emotional loads, leading to a significant deterioration in human mental well-being, increased anxiety, alienation. The decline in the level of mental health of society is evidenced by the inability of a significant part of people to optimally get out of stressful states, an increase in the number of appeals to self-destructive forms of behavior (alcohol, drugs, suicide, etc.), an increase in the number of psychopathologies and forms of deviant behavior. These problems are aggravated by the lack of a system of timely and free specialized psychological assistance to a person in a crisis situation; propaganda by the media of a lifestyle that has a devastating effect on the physical and mental state of a person.
In the scientific and practical aspect, the problem of distinguishing between norm and pathology naturally takes on more specific outlines, but here it remains extremely difficult.
"Both real observations and the use of modern psychological research methods reveal the presence of a huge variety of parameters characterizing human mental activity in various conditions, and, most importantly, an exceptionally wide range of fluctuations in these parameters (psychophysiological indicators, character traits, personality traits, etc.) in different people" (Sociology. Ed. Artemyeva A.V., M., Vlados, 2006, p. 187).
