Exploring Self-Care Behaviours for Mental Health in Infertile Women: A Qualitative Study

Background aim: Infertility has various psychological consequences. Although previous studies paid attention to the psychological effects of infertility and suggested many interventions for infertile patients’ mental health promotion, the design of self-care interventions and the concept and dimensions of mental health self-care have received less attention. This study was conducted to explore the concept and dimensions of self-care behaviour for mental health in infertile women.Methods: This study was conducted from November 2021 to February 2022 using the conventional content analysis approach. Purposive sampling was performed and continued until reaching data saturation. Semi-structured and in-depth interviews were conducted with 19 participants at the Infertility and Reproductive Health Research Center of Babol, Iran. The Graneheim and Lundman method (2004) was used to analyze the data in MAXQDA version 10 software.Results: One theme and three categories emerged from data analysis. The emerging theme of “involving in stress coping strategies” consisted of three categories of 1) emotion-focused stress coping skills, 2) treatment and healthcare-seeking behaviours and 3) self-management of mental symptoms. The findings revealed that self-care behaviours for mental health are a set of behaviors adopted by infertile women to prevent the effects of infertility on their mental health and includes strategies such as emotion-focused stress coping skills, treatment seeking, and self-management of mental symptoms.Conclusion: Infertile women adopt different strategies to deal with mental pressures of infertility. The results can be applied to the development of interventions that aim to promote self-care behaviors for mental health.