IVF patients need more mental health support, charity says

By Charlie Jones

BBC News, Cambridge

Fertility patients need more mental health support, according to a charity which found many experience depression and suicidal feelings.

Amber and Marco Izzo spent seven years and £20,000 trying for a baby when they realised they were at breaking point.

“Partly because we couldn’t afford it and partly because of our mental health, we decided we would only do one more cycle of IVF,” Amber says.

Amber, 28, who lives in Peterborough, found out she was infertile five years ago when she was told she had two blocked fallopian tubes, which she later had removed.

As well as dealing with the grief of her diagnosis, Amber was angry to learn IVF was not offered by the NHS in her local area, despite it being available in others nearby.

“I just felt it was a complete injustice,” she says. “We were told bluntly that if we wanted to proceed, the only choice was to go privately.”

The charity worker took on two more jobs including at an estate agents at weekends, while her hairdresser husband Marco worked extra delivery driver shifts and sold his car to pay for it.

Amber sank into a deep depression as two IVF cycles “failed miserably with terrible embryo quality”.

“I reached such a dark place, I just spiralled,” she says. “I was so close to deciding I did not want to be here any more.

“I felt like a burden on Marco, like I had let my parents down and grandparents. I completely hit rock bottom.”

Amber had to wait for 14 months to see an NHS therapist, who gave her eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy – a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Despite the emotional turmoil, she started a campaign to have NHS funding reinstated in her local area and began support groups. Amber says it was her “proudest achievement to date” when it was successful.

The couple reaped the rewards when they were offered a round of IVF on the NHS, which they started in January last year. When Amber found out she was pregnant, she did not dare to believe it.

“I couldn’t comprehend it had worked. After the campaign and everything else, it almost felt a bit too fairy tale,” she says.

In October, Amber and Marco welcomed baby Joey. Amber says the love she feels for him is something she never knew she could feel.

However, she has been left with mental scars from the trauma of the last seven years.

“I felt like I should enjoy every minute because we had been through so much to get him, so you feel guilty saying ‘this is hard’.

“My post-partum anxiety was so bad and I didn’t feel like I could talk about it because I was worried people would think I was being ungrateful.”

Infertility, which affects about one in seven couples, wreaks a devastating toll on mental health, relationships, finances and careers, according to Dr Catherine Hill, chief executive of Fertility Network UK.

The charity surveyed 1,300 fertility patients and found 40% had experienced suicidal feelings, with 10% struggling with suicidal thoughts often or all the time.

Most respondents wanted counselling, with about half able to access therapy, but most had to fund some of it themselves.

“We know most fertility patients would like to have emotional support, if it was available, but UK fertility clinics only have to provide one free session of fertility counselling, which is far from ideal,” Dr Hill says.

Some areas only offer one free cycle of IVF on the NHS, despite national guidelines recommending three, and others have strict criteria – for example, not having any children already and falling into a certain age and weight range, she says.

“Most patients have to pay typically financially-crippling amounts of money for their own medical treatment. For the country that pioneered IVF, this is unacceptable; we should be doing far more as a society and a health system to help those facing the trauma of infertility,” Dr Hill adds.

Kelly Kew, 27, from Peterborough, was so stressed while trying to conceive that she crashed her car and resigned from her office job.

She had suffered two ectopic pregnancies, where the embryo starts growing in the fallopian tube, and felt she could not take much more.

“Being infertile is isolating,” she says. “I wanted a child before all my friends and they were all on number two or three before I had even got pregnant. I blocked myself off from them and have lost a lot of friends.

“I was really struggling and ended up having therapy. The second one triggered a bit of PTSD so it was a really tough time.”

Her first NHS therapist “didn’t seem to understand”, but a second one advised Kelly on ways to manage her anxiety and she felt in a much better place by the time she and her partner Dan embarked on an NHS-funded round of IVF at Bourn Clinic, near Cambridge.

Baby Harlan-Ray was born just before Christmas and Kelly says she could not be happier. She wants to support other people going through fertility issues and hopes to train as a fertility nurse.

“I still can’t believe we’ve got him, I still can’t believe he’s ours,” she says. “I would not have got through the pregnancy without the therapy I had and we would still be saving up if we’d had to pay for IVF.”

Both Amber and Kelly are thinking about trying for another baby, but they are very aware of the emotional and financial costs, having already used up their one free round of IVF.

Amber is also taking steps to expand her campaign for equal access to NHS fertility treatment.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said it was working on a women’s health strategy for England, containing “a number of important changes and future ambitions to improve the variations in access to NHS-funded fertility services”.

Amber says she will not rest until the access is improved. “I will never forget how hard it has been going through all of this, and I want to do everything I can to make sure others get the help that I did,” she adds.

If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story help and support is available via the BBC Action Line.

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