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.

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).

Until recently, psychiatrists were mainly engaged in the study and description of unusual forms of behavior, various extravagant ones that do not fit into generally accepted ideas about the norm of mental activity characteristics. Studying mental illnesses, analyzing various signs of the onset of the disease, especially with a slow, gradual increase in its manifestations, psychiatrists gave detailed descriptions of both extreme variants of the norm and various mildly pronounced painful changes in mental activity and behavior of people.

For a long time, only the psyche of a healthy person remained the subject of research by sociologists. Currently, it has become quite obvious that the boundaries between norm and deviation are not rigid, discrete, that there are actually many such varieties of behaviors or mental states where it is extremely difficult to unambiguously determine their relationship to norm or pathology, and under certain circumstances, even impossible. "The study of such conditions is possible only with the integrated use of research methods inherent in both sociology and psychiatry" (Sociology of Development. Edited by G.S. Antipin, M., 2000, p. 34).

The exceptional complexity and insufficient elaboration of a number of important, including basic, concepts of psychological science, the lack of strict definitions of the content of these concepts cause a great variety in the designation of various deviations in the content and forms of mental activity. There are significant differences in the set of terms related to conditions located on the border between norm and pathology. In publications on this topic, the concept of "mental abnormalities" is quite common. In some cases, this concept includes only those mental changes that are the result of a violation of personality formation, its abnormal development (psychopathy and accentuation). In another context, mental abnormalities are understood as "all disorders of mental activity that do not reach the psychotic and do not exclude sanity, i.e. the ability to be aware of their actions and direct them, but are accompanied by personal changes that can lead to deviant behavior." This broader interpretation of the term "mental abnormalities" includes, in addition to psychopathies, personality changes in alcoholism, oligophrenia in the degree of debility, other types of intellectual disability, residual effects of traumatic brain injuries, etc.

When trying to correlate the essence of changes in mental activity with these anomalies to the basic concepts of psychological science, there is also a wide variety of approaches. The designation of these deviations may relate to various, fairly general psychological categories. Thus, a fairly common variant is the characteristic of human behavior, which is expressed by the term "deviant behavior". Modifications of this term are definitions such as "deviant", "delinquent", "antisocial", "criminal", "suicidal", etc.

It should be emphasized that none of the listed definitions of deviant behavior can be considered as an indicator of the painful nature of these deviations. Social and medical criteria for evaluating behavior often do not coincide. A mentally healthy person can grossly violate social and legal norms, and, conversely, with pronounced signs of mental pathology, quite law-abiding, socially acceptable behavior can be observed. In many cases, unusual behaviors that differ from some average idea of the norm are associated with character or personality traits.

Depending on both the context of the discussion and the author's initial theoretical positions, the designations of various forms of behavior, actions and reactions of a person of a non-painful nature vary very widely.

"Although modern ethologists (ethology is the science of animal behavior) recognize the complexity of the problem of studying mental life, animal behavior, they still come to the conclusion: "It seems that as our knowledge of animal behavior increases, the differences between humans and animals begin to shrink" (McFarland D. Animal behavior. Psychobiology, ethology and evolution. – Moscow, 1988. – p. 440). At the same time, they are, of course, aware that animals do not have a language (in the human sense), there is no corresponding cultural world. However, there are also many similarities in animal and human behavior.

The idea of the hereditary nature of altruism, kindness, modesty and other moral qualities was especially actively defended in Russian science until recently by the famous geneticist V.P. Efroimson. In a number of his publications, he wrote that the ability to distinguish between good and evil is already inherent in the human genotype. But the ethical code of kindness and altruism can be drowned out by the environment and upbringing. "There is a lot of "animal" in human nature, but there is a lot of "human" in animals," wrote V. Efroimson (Efroimson V.P. Genetics of ethics and aesthetics. St. Petersburg, 1995. – p. 43).