Abstract
The aim of the paper is to present the concept of illness as a socially constructed category, using three major cases of how what is and isn't considered an illness can fluidly change based on context. The first case is homosexuality which, in a mainstream understanding at least, has shifted from a sin to an illness and later, respectively, from an illness to a variation not transgressing borders of health and normality.
The second case is the phenomenon of transgender with its ambiguous status regarding its medical understanding, still being labelled an illness more commonly than homosexuality. The final case is madness as defined by Mad Studies and the tradition of anti-psychiatry, rejecting psychiatric definitions of mental health and mental illness in general and offering the broad and deliberately vague concept of madness instead.
I will seek to compare the three, also attempting to conclude what constitutes an illness and in what contexts is the concept considered beneficial or harmful.