Infertility: Couples' experiences and the use of counselling in treatment centres

Abstract

Infertility can have profound effects on couples, who may spend years in an increasingly stressful quest for conception; by law, counselling must be offered to those undergoing licensed treatments. This study found that such couples relied on their own partnership as their main resource for managing stress. Predominantly the partnership was organized in a psychological division of labour -the woman experiencing emotional pain, the man supporting and seeking positive solutions. Normally a functional joint defence, this could become a dysfunctional split under excessive stress. Where counselling was offered directly, with a couple approach, couples who took it up were enabled to re-establish their own defences more adaptively. However, where access to counselling was by clinical referral - often of a distressed woman partner alone - the couple approach was more difficult to apply though apparently no less relevant. The counsellor-clinician partnership could mirror the ‘division of labour’, with a similar tendency towards dysfunctional splitting under stress.