Abstract
Miscarriage often is a traumatic experience with serious mental health implications. Friends and family members are often uncomfortable with and avoid discussing the topic with bereaved individuals, potentially making them feel ostracized (i.e., being ignored and excluded), contributing to their mental health concerns. We investigated the correlation between posttraumatic stress symptoms, perceived ostracism, and recalled grief intensity measures in a sample of cisgender women (N = 97) who have had a miscarriage. These participants were recruited using Qualtrics’s Panel Recruitment Services. Women’s perceived ostracism correlated positively with posttraumatic stress symptoms and negatively with grief congruence (i.e., the degree to which they felt that their miscarriage process was as satisfactory as possible, given they had to experience it). Perceived ostracism also explained additional variance in posttraumatic stress symptoms when considered alongside grief intensity measures (e.g., congruence).
Highlights
Miscarriage often is a painful, traumatic experience for women (Kersting and Wagner, 2012)
There are several ways of conceptualizing and measuring the grief caused by miscarriage and other forms of perinatal loss, each approach having its own focus on grief manifestations, strengths, and limitations (Setubal et al, 2021)
We found that two of the three recalled grief intensity factors correlated significantly with symptoms: the more that participants recalled being able to confront people about problematic interactions, and the more they recalled their miscarriage experience corresponding with their desire of care, the fewer trauma symptoms they reported
Summary
Miscarriage often is a painful, traumatic experience for women (Kersting and Wagner, 2012). Data demonstrate the experience often is more intense for women who felt the pregnancy was more “real” to them (reality factor), who did Miscarriage, Ostracism, and Trauma not feel they could confront others that said hurtful or dismissive things about the miscarriage (confrontation factor), and/or did not feel the overall process of the miscarriage was handled as well as could be expected (congruence factor; Hutti et al, 1998, 2013, 2014, 2018) Scores on these factors predict posttraumatic stress symptoms (Hutti et al, 2014), as well as mental health outcomes that co-occur with posttraumatic stress, such as anxiety and depression symptoms (Hutti and Baker, 2020). Given the mental health implications, it is imperative that researchers and clinicians understand the diverse social factors that influence women’s miscarriage experiences, grief, and trauma symptoms
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