How did the human condition become an illness?

Its sort of funny because a lot of people in the uk believe mental illnesses are real illnesses. They aren't. They're primarily about other things than biology but there may be biological differences.

Let's take gender identity disorder. Evidence shows people with this diagnosis often have a difference size of the corpus callosum. This sort of information would make the protopsychiatrist Emil Kraeplin jump for joy. He's the Freud of psychiatry.

What would baffle him was the treatment. A mental illness means the thinking or behaviour is modified to be normal. In this case the person would be made to think they had the same biological and mental gender.

This isn't what happens when there's funding available to allow the person to have a sex change. The mental illness part is about offering counselling for the distress. Some people are counselled on their decision to change their sex then counselled through the process.

Two things have happened. Medical technology makes a sex change possible. I know at least one transgender person who is very fit and indiscernable from a woman to the naked eye.

The other is society accepted that some people have a different mental gender to their born biological one.

I would guess there was a time when people who wanted a sex change would be treated as mentally ill in the traditional sense. Perhaps a century ago their individuality would be considered pathological and the healthcare system would work to make them the same as their biological gender.

These social judgements are all about what psychiatry is about.