Social Support and Hopelessness in Women Undergoing Infertility Treatment in Eastern Turkey

Abstract

Hopelessness levels in women negatively correlate with reported level of social support. Informing health professionals about these issues will be an important step toward improving the quality and levels of social support given to women undergoing infertility treatment.

Reversal of the Norm: Pressure Discrepancies on the Two Sides of the Septum in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients with Congestive Heart Failure

“…Infertility has usually been considered a powerful stressor that involves emotional changes [50], and infertile women experience strong psychological distress and negative feelings related to infertility [32]. There is also research showing that social pressure towards family formation and having a child [35,38] and stigmatization in infertility [32,41] are observed to a greater extent in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures. However, the results of the present study showed that this unpleasant and stressful situation had no effect on flourishing at a cultural level.…”

“…Second, in contrast with our expectation, infertility was not associated with a more negative outcome in Iran than in Sweden. There are studies that show that infertility (especially for women) is more stressful and is more negatively experienced in a collectivistic culture than in an individualistic culture [38,41]. Thus, the expectation was to see more negative emotions and/or fewer positive emotions in infertile Iranian women than in infertile Swedish women.…”

“…Thus, stigma or being marginalized may have more negative social and psychological consequences especially for infertile women in collectivistic cultures in which social life and family formation is the center of most human interactions [32,41]. Especially in collectivistic cultures, this may be partly due to still prevailing ideas that infertility is a woman's fault or the denial of the existence of male infertility [42].…”

Psychometric Properties of the Turkish Version of the Fertility Adjustment Scale

“…If the answer is no, it can cause negative social consequences such as poor self-esteem loneliness, hopelessness, depression, grief and isolation. 8,9,12 In this research, we were interested in Turkish women's level of infertility adjustment. However, there is no scale to measure Turkish women's perception of infertility adjustment, hence a need for standardized and well-tested instruments to measure infertile women's adjustment to fertility problem.…”

“…3 Comprehensive studies showed the adverse effects of infertility, such as low quality of life, loss of control, hopelessness, low level of self-efficacy, emotional distress, and anxiety and depression. [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Infertile women are confronted with many difficulties during the treatment process, which require significant psychological adjustments. 13 Adjustment in infertile women during treatment has important effects on their attitudes and accepting to treatments.…”