There are ways we celebrate when someone heals from a severe illness – we might congratulate those in remission from cancer, or maybe even throw them a big party. A person who was sick is now free from disease and all, we assume, must be well. But often, that isn’t true. 

It turns out that people’s mental health after illness often suffers. “‘Once the medical crisis is ‘resolved,’ the expectation is recovery – not just physical, but emotional,” clinical psychologist Alexandra Kutnick writes in STAT News. “Providers may be relieved. Families may celebrate. And patients? They may smile, nod, and try to keep up. But beneath that surface, many remain braced, fragmented, or quietly grieving. Their nervous systems are still in a state of threat, their bodies unfamiliar, their identities destabilized.” 

Unaddressed, this trauma presents as insomnia, brain fog, disconnection, heightened irritability and hypervigilance, at risk of becoming anxiety or depression. So, Kutnick asserts that the fields of medicine and psychology (along with human society) must begin to seriously acknowledge the mental trauma that severe illness leaves behind. It is neither rare nor peripheral but goes largely overlooked and unnamed.

Kutnick’s plea is informed by 20 years of clinical practice, as well as her own traumatic experience. Waking up after an invasive major surgery, she knew she was recuperating physically, but felt “completely severed” from her own body. “At the time, I couldn’t have named it as grief or trauma – I was simply trying to survive. But in the months and years that followed, I came to understand that moment as a deep disconnect.”

These oft-overlooked but ongoing psychological struggles experienced by many patients emphasize the body-mind link – something regularly considered as a root cause of illness, but not nearly enough in terms of lingering scars.

“Society treats illness as a series of discrete medical events while ignoring the psychological aftermath that often follows.” But, Kutnick says, failing to consider the mental relationship a patient feels to their body after sickness amounts to a failure to provide high quality care. By ignoring that responsibility, well-intentioned professionals “risk retraumatizing people in the very systems meant to support them.” 

Instead, physicians must practice with the understanding that “healing isn’t just about survival metrics or physical function,” Kutnick writes. “It’s about helping people repair their relationship with their bodies and their lives.”