The Medicalisation of Sadness and its Impact on the Stigma of Depression in the 20th Century

🐇 The rabbits, the heartbreak, and why I chose the truth. 🐰 For her 13th birthday, Maya asked for rabbits. So, naturally, we didn’t just get her one… we got two. 😂

Meet Milky, our beautiful white boy (who, we later discovered, was actually albino), and Biscuit, our gorgeous girl. They had their lovely home, the food recommended by the pet shop, and everything we could possibly think of to give them a good start.

And then, this week, in the cruellest twist, they both died within 48 hours of each other. 💔

The heartbreak Maya felt was enormous. And, if I’m honest, it was felt throughout the whole family.

There was a temptation to soften it. To tell her they had escaped. To give her a gentler story that might hurt less.

But I couldn’t.

Because Maya deserved the truth.

I told her that sometimes animals get sick. Sometimes something happens. Sometimes they are bitten or injured. And sometimes, despite being loved and cared for, they simply die.

It broke her heart.

But I also believe that learning how to experience sadness is part of learning how to experience life.

And this took me straight back to something I wrote during my Master’s degree in Medical Humanities: “The Medicalisation of Sadness and its Impact on the Stigma of Depression in the 20th Century.”

One of the arguments I explored was how medicine can sometimes lose sight of the context in which people experience sadness — forgetting that sadness itself is not necessarily an illness. It is a human experience. An ancient, ordinary, unavoidable part of being alive.

And perhaps parenting is a little like that too.

We are often desperate to protect our children from pain. To fix it. Distract them from it. Put a softer story around it. Make the difficult things disappear.

But maybe our job isn’t always to remove the sadness.

Maybe sometimes our job is to sit beside them while they feel it.

Maya cried. Properly cried. The kind of crying where your heart hurts for your child because you would take the pain from them in an instant if you could.

But we didn’t hide the truth.

And then, eventually, she smiled again.

She watched her rabbit programmes. She talked about Milky and Biscuit. She processed what had happened. She was sad — and then she wasn’t quite so sad anymore.

And now, hearing that infectious joy coming from her electric wheelchair is, quite honestly, music to our ears. ❤️

The photograph says heartbroken.

The moments afterwards say life goes on.

And perhaps that’s the lesson.

We cannot fully appreciate happiness if we never learn that sadness is part of the same human story.

I don’t want to raise a child who believes that every painful thing can be hidden, fixed or explained away.

I want to raise someone who knows that grief can be felt without being feared. That tears are not weakness. That sadness doesn’t need to be medicated away simply because it is uncomfortable.

Sometimes you just need to feel it.

And then, when you’re ready, you find your way back to joy. ❤️

Goodbye, Milky and Biscuit. 🐰🤍🐰

You were only with us for a short time, but you were very, very loved.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” — Rumi

And perhaps, most importantly for parenting:

“We cannot protect our children from life’s difficulties. We can only teach them that they are strong enough to live through them.”

Because the goal isn’t to raise children who never hurt.

It is to raise children who know that they can hurt, heal, and still find their way back to joy. ❤️