I was hugely heartened by the recent research, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility (awful title but it's an academic journal!), which showed that feeling anxious or depressed when going through fertility treatment didn't affect the outcome. I've always maintained that it's unhelpful to tell people who are embarking on fertility treatment that they should be cheerful and positive when they are living with the huge emotional ups and downs of infertility - it just seems completely unrealistic. I know I felt stressed, anxious and worried when I was having IVF. I was not happy, I was not positive, I was unable to "visualise success" or any of the other things that we are often told will increase our chances of a successful outcome - and yet my treatment worked.
We need to be realistic, to accept that infertility is stressful, that it often makes you unhappy and miserable. There's a growing industry surrounding conventional fertility treatments of complementary therapists and coaches who make a lot of money telling us how they feel we can improve our chances of success. Some of this can be very helpful, but it is perhaps inevitable that when those who have no personal experience take an objective view of infertility and treatment there are sometimes fundamental misunderstandings which can lead to this kind of advice that's often way off the mark. It's just like the friends who tell you that you'd probably get pregnant if you stopped thinking about it...
I've seen too many people who've blamed themselves for their unsuccessful treatment, somehow feeling that they've failed when it doesn't work, and that it must be something they've done or haven't done, that it might have worked if they'd been able to be more upbeat and positive. Now there's research to show that this simply isn't the case - infertility and unsuccessful treatment makes you depressed - depression doesn't lead to infertility and unsuccessful treatment.
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