That can make it particularly difficult for patients to cope with feelings about what they've endured and what their future is likely to be, or for family members and physicians to see and understand their feelings. Stigma continues to surround depression, adds Vaccaro, and many patients may hide their state of mind from families and caregivers alike. Even among primary-care physicians, depression goes unrecognized about 50 percent of the time, Stern explains. Many doctors don't know the criteria, and don't speak with patients long enough to establish whether they have the symptoms of depression. Sometimes, physicians believe that being depressed after surgery is 'understandable' and unworthy of diagnosis or treatment.
Many patients naturally feel anxious about their course of recovery.
And if so, to treat it. What may complicate matters for many physicians is the unpredictability of patients' reactions to surgery, and the wide variety of meanings the experience may hold for patients once they begin to reflect on it. One patient may cope extremely well with something as invasive and traumatic as a hip replacement, while another may have difficulty coming to terms with a far less physically traumatic arthroscopic joint procedure. Covino says there simply is no way of being able to predict beforehand whether patients will be able to manage their own short-term postsurgical feelings or whether they'll have longstanding depression requiring treatment. You don't know the meaning that surgery has for a person, for instance, unless they tell you.