Miscarriage can lead to 'long-term post-traumatic stress'
bbc.com
bbc.com
I am pregnant again, but I am not the same. I am not excited, I am not making plans. We waited to tell our parents until 13 weeks. Even though I'm showing, I've told the people who absolutely need to know because I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to have a baby shower because I don't want to have to look all the stuff if the baby ends up dying.
I participate in /r/Miscarriage, /r/ttcafterloss, and /r/pregnancyafterloss. People there are sad about losses that happened months, years, sometimes even 10 years ago. They - we! - are triggered by pregnant women, our original due dates (next week for me), the idea of getting pregnant again.
It's a surprise to me that we're able to call this a discovery. I feel like a Native American talking to Christopher Columbus.
We had a very stressful pregnancy (we were teenagers with no money and unhappy soon-to-be-grandparents). There was no joy in it, we tried not to tell anyone, and only two people said "congrats" when they found out. I'm sad about that to this day ... especially for my wife, who I think missed out on something a lot of women delight in.
Our other three kids came through foster care, they showed up with little notice and we adopted them several years later. There was no pregnancy experience.
So we've never celebrated a pregnancy, but we sure as heck celebrate our kids.
Historically, many cultures didn't even name a baby for the first week or so for this reason. There were typically justifications in tradition or some such, but the fact was that many infants simply didn't live that long and this reduced the emotional attachment. People carry out so much before birth these days that your solution may the best mitigation of a tragic circumstance (along with reducing rates of miscarriage, that is).
I’m sorry to hear this and it must make you sad every time you think about it.
I think it is very difficult to go through life, experiencing all of life’s milestones in the way we might wish.
Another example is in those fortunate to celebrate a work retirement party. Others may fall ill, take leave and quietly retire without returning to work and have no retirement party.
Life seems unpredictable, unfair. Knowing that makes celebrations of life, when we can have them, much more special.
https://psiloveyou.xyz/walking-the-tightrope-between-miscarr...
https://medium.com/messy-mind/emergency-room-flashbacks-871e...
And after pregnancy, it was also very impersonal, nurses called my wife "mom" every single time, as if she had no personality. That also was probably helping newly minted moms cope with the confusion that comes after birth by reinforcing their status.
Weird experience, but definitely worth every minute of it.
They are very personal and emotional moments so I can totally see how it can rub different people different ways, though.
Best of luck and best wishes to you. I hope it works this time. If it does, I'm sure everything will feel worth it.
For emotional coping/healing we've been most helped by unconventional practices like energy kinesiology, NET [1] and acupuncture.
It's outside of mainstream psychology/science, but it's worked well for us, to find understanding and maintain optimism.
I'm confident further use of these kinds of practices will keep us from suffering long-term PTSD-type effects, but I've no doubt we'll always be affected by the experience, particularly my partner.
Best wishes to you.
I can relate to this. Our first pregnancy ended at week 10 or so. During the next three, my thought process can be summed up as "hurry up and get out of that uterus, I can't help you if something happens while you're in there". Very stressful months, especially nearing the due date.
She’s pregnant again and it seems to be going better, but I noticed she was very hesitant to tell anyone about it until she had to. Also seems to be very cautious about the whole thing. Not making preparations until she has to.
We are friends and still pretty close. Any tips on how to support her through this?
Ask her, maybe she'll tell you. Talk with her and share your thoughts, the things you wrote just above. -- Maybe can work, when you're still pretty close friends
Again I don't really know and maybe this is a weird idea.
Am I misunderstanding or are you saying that is generally what you try to tell people when they tell you they are pregnant?
I truly hope not. That has to be one of the worst things to say to someone who confides in you that they are pregnant. Unless of course they have already shared a similar thought with you, of course.
The same way you congratulate somebody for being accepted at an university, not knowing whether they will make it to the PhD or not.
ps: this prompted me to dig about classes of grief. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
research has a notion of "complicated grief" when fhe process is somehow stalled for long.
The things we went through make a lot of sense after the fact, but it's surprising to me how many people wouldn't or couldn't understand, even afterward, even those who should have known better. On the other hand, we ourselves didn't really fully appreciate the extent of what the effects could be until everything happened, so maybe it just reflects limitations of the human mind.
Still, it was remarkable to me how often people would dismiss issues, assuming that because they had some minimal textbook understanding of what was going on, that they understood all the actual complications of the problems involved (in the "reality is more detailed than you think" sense). Not to empathize with us, but to minimize how upset they felt we should be, or to suggest we didn't really understand the situation and they did.
The "you should be excited and assume everything will work out because you're pregnant" assumption was also remarkably indelible in peoples' minds. At some point, we started doing the opposite, assuming that things wouldn't work out (because they hadn't worked out multiple times before that and were actually told by experts it wouldn't work out sans serious medical interventions). People would nevertheless discuss situations we found ourselves in, or things we did, puzzled by it, without questioning their basic assumption that someone(s) who are pregnant assume it will work out, that the pregnancy is viable, that they know that it is viable, that they understand why or why not it is viable, the likelihood of future pregnancies being viable, and are happy about the answers to all these sorts of questions.
We eventually had a child after we had totally abandoned any thought that it could happen, out of the blue, so there's that. But the entire experience left us with a deep sense of how little some will or can put themselves in others' shoes. It seems like the only places I can be sure understand are those healing after pregnancy loss groups and forums, maybe along with select therapists who specialize in these issues.
There's also a lot to be said about the medical system surrounding repeated pregnancy loss, the overselling of procedures, risk management, and how little is really known about who gets pregnant or not and why.
https://www.deannakahler.com/book-inner
Never thought an opportunity to recommend that would come across HN, but here we are...
We made it through together. When you have children you have to accept that you may lose them and must be prepared to handle it. Still in all, several years got eaten up there with worry, doubts, and fears.
We had a 100% healthy "Double-Rainbow" son in 2010, he's just about 10 years old now.
Keep your head up, be kind to yourself, and be aware that LOTS more people than you imagine have gone through this.
American culture does not know what to do about natal issues. (Arguably, no culture ever has) We need to recognize that reproductive health goes far beyond binary abortion debates, and can affect women permanently, to say nothing of the rest of the family. I can say, knowing people that suffer from PTSD for natal issues and long term war trauma, the degrees of suffering may be different, but the unhealthy coping mechanisms can do equal amount of damage.
If you or your family is dealing with miscarriage or infertility, there is help and support out there specifically for you. I would be happy to help point anyone toward the resources that I know of, and more than happy to talk to any husbands who want help knowing how to support their wives.
Because the vast majority of correct answers are politically incorrect. There are a lot of causes of infertility, but the two main ones in the developed world are delayed pregnancy and obesity (mediated most often by PCOS) - both of which are personal choices.
And it's simply not an option to tell a woman the medical reality that career-before-kids or eating too many calories is guaranteed to reduce your chances of having children. We have collectively decided that sparing others' feelings and indulging in others' have-it-all fantasies is the pinnacle of moral behavior.
On the mens' side, we also contend with sperm counts halving in 40 years and virtually nobody caring beyond half-hearted "hey look at this scary stat lol" level commentary. Motility and morphology have also seen dramatic declines. For whatever reason, we simply don't care.
If you have married friends or friends with kids, its probably best not to joke about when they're going to pop one out. Fertility can be long, expensive, and not very fun.
Answer: very†. But it often isn’t talked about.
And, I strongly agree, not talking about it is very Bad indeed.
Ironically, I think developed nations’ success in all but eliminating premature deaths from once-ubiquitous infectious diseases has left recent generations without the highly-practised coping skills, social support systems, and painfully resigned stoicism that helped get our great-great-grandparents through the horrible inevitable process of burying half their kids before the poor little bleeders could even make it to adulthood.
We’re all now such strangers to death we’re shit-scared by even the thought of talking about it, never mind directly facing up to it ourselves.
--
† Even assuming the hosting part works perfectly, the whole DNA splicing and replication process is always an absolute crapshoot‡.
‡ And, to be fair, if it weren’t for all those accidental copy errors none of us would be here now to argue the issue, for life on Earth would never have advanced beyond the single cell. So yay for an imperfect process, but—bloody hell—is it one harsh SOB.
I often say things like "people should talk about this kind of stuff more because it would help them through it". I obviously mean it in a general sense (very much not trying to get specific people to talk about specific problems). Responses vary from an insincere "yeah..." to the rather odd "you can't tell people what to do".
(Edit: I'm not wanting to say that a miscarriage is a small misfortune. No, it's not. But there are many many worse things which can go wrong.)
Survivorship bias is such an amazingly powerful force on our mental models of how the world works.
Without that knowledge, when it happens there's the immediate fear that there's something wrong with you, that you'll never be able to have kids, that it's hopeless. When in reality it happens a lot, including to countless couples who go on to have big happy families.
They say if we were able to track 'unrecognized' pregnancies, the total rate of miscarry across all pregnancies is likely much higher than 25%
Cannot stress this enough. If a couple is childfree by choice they'll probably tell you. If they don't talk about whether they want kids or not, you shouldn't raise the topic.
If you’re close enough with someone to talk about intimate topics, say, sex, baby making plans are ok for discussion.
Back off if the person doesn’t want to talk about it.
But we are an open society, and part of that is talking about things.
https://expectingscience.com/2015/08/26/lies-damned-lies-and...
but is mostly quoting numbers conditional upon having detected a heartbeat. That first check is pretty terrifying. My anecdata matches yours: lots of miscarriages in immediate social groups.
Double whammy that lead to the worst ~3 years of my life.
Leadership fixed the glitch.
Luckily I had some real good people around me to help me through it all.
https://medium.com/messy-mind/emergency-room-flashbacks-871e...
My partner and I suffered from a miscarriage and then a seeming inability to fall pregnant again. All of the tests we did came back fine - everyone just said "keep trying" but eventually we started to see "unexplained infertility" appearing in the medical notes which was crushing and terrifying.
To cut a long, emotionally painful, and expensive story short, we almost accidentally found out my partner has some quirk in their immune system: NK cells (CD16+, CD56+). This does not appear to be something that is routinely checked for.
A quick consultation at a specialist consultant, a small number of some very benign tablets along with 1 home injection (very cheap - perhaps £80/month) and two months later - after literally years - we were naturally pregnant.
37 weeks so far and everything is completely ordinary and normal - a huge relief compared to where we were several years ago.
If you are in a similar situation, please know that there may be a way out. It is a very dark road, but there can be light at the end of the tunnel. Talk about the NK cells with your doctor and see what they say - the NHS in the UK pooh-poohed it (despite being prepared to give us IVF at significant expense), but it worked for us when going privately, and the consultant's waiting room was full of pregnant women so we're not just a fluke I guess. I just hope that oen day this enters the mainstream so that people can try it before IVF and other invasive treatments.
If anyone wants to know the clinic we used in London, please email any user at e43.xyz (catchall will pick it up) or reply here
We had to wait a bit before trying again but not too long later had twins and in an odd sort of way it seemed like that gave some balance to the situation.
And miscarriages are certainly traumatic.
Also it is said early occult miscarriage rate is 40%. It's early because less than 1 week, it's occult because we don't realize it, no sign of pregnancy, so we can't observe it most of the time.
The book I'm currently reading(The Vital Question) said that miscarriage rate is high because zygote dies in case of inefficient mitonuclear match, filtering the bad fits.
https://americanpregnancy.org/pregnancy-loss/stillborn-survi...
It is a touchy subject because it is easy to interpret as invalidating deep personal feelings, but that isn't the goal at all.
Would, say, young people drafted for war from a modern Spartan society experience the same trauma in war as young people drafted from Berkeley? I am sure that individuals from both sides would have experiences across the spectrum, but would the distribution differ?
I do think that modern Western society goes to extremes to prevent children from experiencing or even knowing about the harsh realities of the world and it's not hard to conclude that when the sheltered youth are dumped into reality (considerably more) serious mental illness follows as the world they were prepared for and the world they live in are very different.
You're certainly onto something. In other cultures, schizophrenia has historically been viewed through a mythological lense as a possession by or visitation from benevolent spirits. In stark contrast to Western manifestation of the disorder, voices and hallucinations take on a much more benign form[1].
People by and large can be rather content in a wide range of environments, even if by comparison to other environments they seem quite harsh oppressive. Normalcy is very much a social construct - even ideas about something as universal as pain can vary widely, to the effect that some cultures are more likely than others to seek out physical and mental trials which others may consider traumatic.
Indeed, to some degree we have a loosly related term for a phenomenon where those who suffer abuse have no desire to leave their abusers: Stockholm Syndrome. Except imagine instead of being raised by a tormentor with whom you come to sympathize, you develop in a society where certain "abuses" are wholly normalized - if everyone around you shares the experience openly, particularly if justified with myth or alleged purpose, it becomes much less likely to cause trauma. Consider the abhorrent practice of, say, genital mutilation, or general oppressiveness common in certain parts of the middle East or Africa - while I do not condone such practices, I suspect that the majority of those who experience them do not suffer from anything like PTSD, as they are common and effectively normalized. I'd be very interested to see a study on the subject.
1. https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health-scien...
Most of Sparta was slaves, and the upper class participated in murder of slaves as a rite of passage, so I doubt there is a lot in common.
What's really, and ironically, happening here is that "Sparta" is a movie utopia us pathetic moderners have invented to mask our anxieties behind an ideal about Real Men who spent their lives kicking Persians into giant pits instead of dealing with credit overdrafts (and, occasionally, PTSD).
Question for any of us who romanticize more austere, brutish times is; why? There are many ways to test ourselves, doing so helps with perspective I believe.
1. Thing X happens in our world
2. We shelter people / avoid discussing the realities of thing X
3. People that experience thing X are severely, negatively emotionally impacted
Wondering if talking about thing X more openly in our society would help avoid/temper/mitigate that impact seems... like a reasonable line of thought to me.
Trauma is immensely affected by cultural practice.
120yr ago many infants died from childbirth complications and of those that didn't a large fraction dropped dead by age 5. It wasn't unheard of for parents to give subsequent kids the names of older deceased siblings. This was all considered normal and for the most part nobody got too bent out of shape over it.
Some definitely did, stories can easily be found which confirms that those experiences where some times traumatic. The question is about how it was different for an individual or a population in much different circumstances.
Some time ago I talked to my neighbor (76 y/o woman), while my wife was pregnant, she happily told me that she had 6 kids and 2 miscarriages. Like it was a very normal thing. I asked and she said it was just part of it, the fetuses were probably not healthy to begin with. She seemed of the opinion that it was just part of life and it didn't seem to affect her. I didn't ask further but I do notice myself that once you start taking about miscarriages or, in our case, difficulties getting pregnant, many people went through the same experiences. And certain experiences seem commonplace. On me that has a consoling effect.
Do you think it would have helped if you would have known about the possibility in advance? Or had friends go through the same and society in general being much more open about these things? My mother in law told me about her miscarriage only when our son was 2. I think it would have (hypothetically) helped us be more open and accepting if we would have known in advance.
Thank you for being so open about this on the jungle that is the internet. It takes a lot of courage to come back and read replies.
That number won't change. The main cause of miscarriage is that the embryo/foetus has a massive problem and can't ever develop. There is nothing medical science can do. In fact many more miscarriages are known about today - 50 years ago most women wouldn't even have known they were pregnant they would have thought they had a late heavy period.
If you are trying for your first child and nothing is working though, it can be absolutely crushing emotionally. You end up not just being envious of pregnant friends/colleagues/people on the street, but even being envious of fucking plants that manage to reproduce successfully when you can't. It is a very existential thing, and it is utterly consuming.
I've also found that a lot of the older generations like to say "oh when I was your age we just got on with it!" (Or similar) regardless of situation, context, or emotions.
Compared to if one has tried just once, and that was a miscarriage.
Our fifth and sixth babies miscarried. Our seventh had his second birthday the other week, and it's still really hard for me to finish typing this comment and post it.
I am sure it affects everyone to some extent, women and men, and some more than others. I would never tell anyone that what they are feeling is wrong. Just know that you are not alone, not by a long shot.
Can we really assume we do not know about the possibility ? Why do you think there are so many ultrasounds and medical checkups during pregnancy ?
Modern life is denial towards mundane risks of life.
This change brought tons of empathy in our culture that led to equality for women, LBGT, minorities and so on, but it also makes us weaker when facing proper pain, be it physical or psychical.
My grandma lost a boy, first baby, after few weeks when it got diarrhea and doctors couldn't save it even with antibiotics of that day. She 'moved on' and had 2 healthy babies afterwards, my father included. Around Halloween we have the tradition of visiting graves of our close ones, and I can see that bond is still strong when we visit his grave. She is a happy cheerful person, no dark shadow of this ever visible.
As a young father a month-old baby, the very idea that something like that would happen to him makes me shiver, I don't think I could handle it. Today I saw an article on BBC about British NHS mistreatments, and there was a picture of a cute newborn boy that died after 6 days due to viral infection that got to his heart. I feel no shame as a man to admit I cried quite a bit after seeing that cute face that didn't get a chance for proper life.
Complicated topic...
BTW, it seems weird that the article is treated as discovery...
It’s much higher than I would have thought, and rises quickly after 32, just when many people are hitting their professional stride, which is extremely unfortunate.
Early testing is nice, but with subsequent attempts to get pregnant we chose to wait quite a bit longer after a missed period before doing a pregnancy test, because we didn't want to go through the roller coaster again.
I'm grateful that I was able to get to my regular gyno quickly and have her show me what was going on, go to the hospital of my choosing after getting ready to be there for a few days, and then have doctors who respected my agency while making it clear that this was something that needed to be ended right away (Germany).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_...
Women obviously bear the majority of the stress (carrying the baby, unavoidable thoughts of 'what did I do to cause this?', etc.), but as the spouse in this situation it was always nice - though relatively rare - when friends/coworkers/etc. would check in on me and ask how I'm doing. I don't have PTSD, but I'm definitely not the same as I was before my wife's first loss.
A good rule of thumb is to treat people with compassion and support, because you don’t know what they are going through.
> Not sure why you're being downvoted
I find that people on Hacker News tend to downvote any kind of short comments. When I came across this thread, it was empty and I didn't like seeing an empty thread, so I wanted to say something to break the ice. (At this point, the post has 18 points, so clearly cooler heads prevailed.)
My wife tells stories about seeing her father suddenly start sobbing when she came across items that her parents bought for their first pregnancy.
Later, when we had a miscarriage, (fortunately very early,) my boss told me about his. Even though we were on the phone, I could tell he was holding back tears.
Thankfully we haven't had serious fertility problems. What helped in our case was, throughout my life, hearing about my parents' miscarriage, sister's miscarriage, cousin's miscarriage. I knew it was normal.
Of course close family [that know about it] will also feel grief; that’s only natural. I think the point being made is that it is far worse for the individual doing the actual miscarrying. On top of the grief there can also be powerful feelings of guilt, anger, personal responsibility; plus they’ve a bloody great biochemical hurricane going down too.
(e.g. Compare and contrast the effects of postpartum depression following a successful pregnancy.)
Look, no-one says grieving spouses don’t require support too (of course they do!), but it’s entirely reasonable to suggest that women who miscarry suffer more severe trauma requiring significantly higher and more specialized professional support. Terms like “PTSD” and “medication“ do not get bandied around for fun, you know. Particularly by a medical profession that has a less-than-perfect history of taking “female problems” seriously.
So try starting from the assumption that however bad it may make you feel, the other person feels a whole shit-ton worse, and show some flipping grace as you work your way from there.
The comparison (to my understanding) is wholly in your comment.
I’m not sure why you are comparing. I’m genuinely not sure. Prior to your comment there didn’t seem to be any discussion about for whom it was more traumatic.
Maybe I’m missing something? Some implied context or content?
Then you're missing the personal experience to contribute meaningfully to this discussion.
So now do you want to know why I initially posted? Because as soon as a discussion about women was brought up, a bunch of men came in and made it about themselves. I may not have kids but at least I have empathy and a working theory of mind, along with occasional manners. Congrats.
Like all things this depends on the individuals involved, and while it's probably usually worse for the female (the hormonal effects you mention are very real), this is absolutely not a universal truth, especially in the longer term.
Then, when we got pregnant again, and it sticked, she felt better, and it passed for her for good.
Meanwhile I was holding my breath for years. I'm still trying to recover from this loss, 7 years on. We have 2 beautiful, perfect, healthy twin girls. They're baby 2 and 3. We're so lucky with them... And they're quite the handful !...
But I still think almost daily of the little one we lost. It's still very, very painful to me. Therapy and EMDR help, but man...
But I'd say it's "yes", and that may be part of the reason for the prevalence of war at the time (causing even more trauma).
I don't believe that they were 'more comfortable' with death.
More rugged from having to deal with it, but I think the trauma is still there. Plus the fact that people didn't necessarily talk about it, I suggest this was a huge cause of emotional turmoil everywhere.
We talked about potentially doing a surrogate, an option that she shot down unless it was the very last resort. She wanted to carry our child, and experience everything that pregnancy has to offer. Not every day is easy, but she truly enjoys this phase of her and our daughter’s life.
You can say that's Whataboutism, but for most of history losing a child was what happened to most people.
So calling the sadness and awful experience from a miscarriage 'long-term post-traumatic stress' might be technically true one in six times if physiologists say so (not sure they have, the BBC has), to me that just further stigmatizes what is a sad but common occurrence no one talks about and implies we all live with trauma which can't be healthy to keep shoving down our throats.
Even if true, that doesn't mean it wasn't heartbreaking and didn't have long-term effects on the family.
Giving it to women and their partners who have a miscarriage or the loss of a child is also heartbreaking.
I'm not saying don't talk about, I'm just saying calling it trauma and PTSD will irrevocably harm some people and possibly hurt more than it will help.
I don't think the media should lie even if it harms people. But equally I don't think the story here is a story that justifies the harm it might cause, they still can tell the truth responsibly if the BBC just took care and didn't chase clicks.
It's been suggested that PSTD can be "contagious", but the connection between "PTSD" and a specific trauma (ie: the belief that some specific trauma "is supposed to" cause PTSD) isn't the vector.
If something causes PTSD, it causes PTSD. Pretending otherwise doesn't prevent it.
The average life span in the 1700s was 35 years old.
1 out of 100 MOTHERS died during childbirth centuries ago.
You could get an infection and be dead in a week because there were no antibiotics.
Spanish flu killed 10 percent of the worlds population, the black plagues death rate was far far higher than that.
Cholera, red fever, polio, there were so many and such variety of different ways to die.
Death was a constant specter and I imagine life was considered a little cheaper? I don't know.
I don't know if people had constant endless PTSD back then or if PTSD is our natural state, or if PTSD is contextual, and nowdays we live in extremely pro mental health times.
Either way its testament to how amazing modern medicine has become and how valuable everyones lives are nowdays.