Twinning leisure with positive experience is the field orthodoxy. There are good reasons for this. In bidding for scarce resources, leisure professionals need to emphasize the social benefits of leisure investment. The cost is that our understanding of leisure is distorted by accentuating the positive side of experience. This paper argues that leisure studies have allowed the parameters of leisure to be defined by a medical model of social practice. Abnormal leisure has been treated as the sphere of medical practitioners, psychoanalysts and criminologists. There is no substantive reason why this is the case. Indeed the paper suggests that the relaxation of rules and inhibitions associated with many forms of leisure means that there is an elective affinity between leisure and deviant activity. In order to correct the medicalized view of leisure it is necessary to challenge both the view of leisure professionals that leisure, is about positive experience, and the category of abnormal behaviour. The paper offers a preliminary basis for mounting this challenge by identifying three forms of abnormal leisure: invasive, mephitic and wild. The purpose of the paper is not to criticize leisure professionals or for that matter medical practitioners. Rather, the aim is to restore balance and richness to the field. It is argued that this balance was lost in the 17th century when the medicalized model of human behaviour began to gain ascendancy.