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At least one group of researchers set about creating a psychological testing instrument that would measure people's levels of adjustment to infertility, citing
...psychological interventions can aim to help people gradually to develop realistic expectations about the outcomes of treatments and to work within a time frame to encourage preparation for both positive and negative outcomes.
{Glover et al., Development of the fertility adjustment scale. Fertil Steril, 72:4 : 623-628}
As has thus far been more typical of European studies, the researchers concluded that their fertility adjustment scale (FAS) might be concretely useful for clinics wanting to assess the more holistic, psychological needs of their patients, and not simply focus on pregnancy outcomes as delivered by clinics.
One promising study saw a significant increase in viable pregnancies in women who participated in group psychological intervention. {Domar et al., Impact of group psychological interventions on pregnancy rates in infertile women. Fertil Steril, 73:4 : 805-811}
Another study added men to the picture by offering couples' therapy groups to IVF patients. Here, the focus was admittedly not on impacting fertility per se, but simply on the psychological benefit of adding such services to treatment programs. These researchers concluded that both men and women found the groups helpful in dealing with treatment stress. {McNaughton-Cassill et al., Development of brief stress management support groups for couples undergoing in vitro fertilization treatment. Fertil Steril, 74:1 : 87-93}
So while research does exist that might complement the old folk tale admonitions to "just relax," there is very obviously room for more.
In their presentation to the XXX Congress of the European Association for Behavioural Cognitive Therapies in September of this year, Dr's. Antonio Rodrigues, Edward Wolff and Mandy Wolff described a personality type which they propose can lead to, among other physical ailments, infertility: the Time Urgent Perfectionist (TUP).
Beginning in 1996 with endometriosis patients being seen at the Medfem Clinic, near Johannesburg, South Africa, Rodrigues and the Wolff's started closely assessing their personality types, and concluded that 95% of them presented with a TUP personality.
The researchers next observed whether there was a correlation between TUP and development of endometriosis. Their findings, according to Dr. Rodrigues: in the population which was observed, that being all Medfem clinic patients, of all races, and of all employment types (including homemakers), "The physiology of TUP correlated 100% with the development of endometriosis. This was related to immunological criteria." The correlation is apparently so close that the higher a person's TUP score on the instrument forumulated by the researchers, the greater the number of symptoms.
© Tracy Morris
