In fairness: the patient has typical anxiety and depressive symptoms, focused on a prior medical intervention, with fairly typical manifestations. It&#x27;s the nature of these sorts of conditions that they have enormous and interesting heterogeneity in particular focuses of obsession for the patients.<p>It doesn&#x27;t make his suffering, or the suffering of patients with similar ailments, any less real or traumatizing. Its effects aren&#x27;t any less tragic. However, fundamentally, there isn&#x27;t really a great model of care for people who won&#x27;t or can&#x27;t believe that their ailment is psychological and requires psychological treatment (&quot;But he didn’t stick with them or the psychologist. He felt like no one was listening to him. His head wasn’t the problem — someone needed to fix his nose!&quot;)It doesn&#x27;t help anyone to keep making up new diagnoses for every manifestation of depression and anxiety, just so people can feel &quot;acknowledged&quot; - and validated in not treating the underlying issue. So many of these emerging conditions ultimately show little response to their supposed underlying mechanisms, and normal responses (for depression and anxiety) to anti-depressants and cognitive behavioral therapy.  (&quot; He spent most of his time alone in his bedroom with a humidifier. After doctors treated him with cognitive therapy and an antidepressant, many of his symptoms cleared up.&quot;)<p>Of more interest to me, personally, is the frequency of post-surgical anxiety. I&#x27;ve seen it in enough patients to know that it&#x27;s not restricted to turbinate reductions, it doesn&#x27;t always correlate to pre-existing mental health problems, and that it can often resolve when the surgery is &quot;fixed&quot; (e.g., removing lap-bands). This is a general phenomenon that receives little attention, causes a lot of suffering, and would help a lot of patients if we understood it better. Chasing down rabit-holes by pretending the anxiety is something &#x2F;else&#x2F; doesn&#x27;t help anyone.