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A successful surgery can coexist with significant emotional distress.

The nervous system often recovers on a different timeline than the body.

Recognizing medical trauma can support both psychological and physical healing.

All too often, mental health and physical health are treated as distinctly separate. Mental health practitioners are often not trained on physiology, and medical providers are not always trauma informed.

One of the consequences of this split is that medical events such as surgery are treated as purely physical, with no consideration of the potential mental health implications. Surgery recovery is generally focused on physical outcomes such as mobility, temperature regulation, and infection prevention, all of which deserve attention.

Far less attention is paid to what happens psychologically after a major medical event.

Researchers have increasingly recognized that illness, injury, surgery, and recovery can be experienced as traumatic. As McBain and Cordova (2024) note, "There has been an increased focus on scholarly work related to medical trauma and medically induced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)." While most people associate PTSD with events such as combat, assault, or natural disasters, medical experiences can also overwhelm a person's sense of safety and control.

This growing area of research challenges the implicit assumption that emotional recovery naturally follows physical recovery.

For some patients, it does not.

The prevalence of postoperative traumatic stress may be higher than many clinicians realize. According to El-Gabalawy and colleagues (2019), "Postoperative traumatic stress occurs in........

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