Picture this: it’s 11 p.m., you’re six days past a five-day embryo transfer, and you’re lying in the dark with your phone face-down on the nightstand because you promised yourself you wouldn’t Google symptoms again. You’ve been trying to act normal at work, at family dinners, at the grocery store. You’ve been carrying something enormous, mostly alone, because explaining it feels harder than just getting through it.
That quiet, heavy space between hope and heartbreak is where millions of people live during IVF. And it’s almost never what makes the headlines.
The Data Tells One Story. You’re Living Another.
New figures from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) are making headlines: IVF patient numbers in the UK have nearly tripled over the past three decades, rising from approximately 19,000 patients in the early 1990s to more than 53,000 in 2024. Globally, more than 13 million babies have been born through assisted reproductive technologies since IVF began - a number that continues to grow each year.
These are genuinely remarkable milestones. They reflect decades of scientific progress, expanding access, and a quiet transformation in how families are built. Today, IVF births account for more than 3% of all UK births. In the US, roughly 450,000 IVF cycles are performed annually. The numbers are extraordinary.
But here’s what the data can’t capture: behind every one of those patient numbers is a person, or couple, or family navigating the simultaneous hope and grief of infertility.
What Medical Coverage Leaves Out
When journalists report on IVF milestones, they focus on what can be measured: cycle volumes, success rates, live birth percentages. While the information is important, it quietly erases the full picture.
The two-week wait is a psychological experience, not just a logistical one. After an embryo transfer, your medical appointments stop. The monitoring ends. You go home, and you wait. And you’re told not to test. You’re told there’s nothing you can do to cause or prevent your tiny embryo from implanting. For many people, this is the hardest stretch of the entire process — the space where hope and terror live side by side.
A failed cycle is a loss, not just a setback. Each unsuccessful round carries its own grief: the embryo itself, the future you’d started to imagine, the months and money and emotional reserves you spent getting there. These losses are often invisible to the people around you, which can make the grief feel even lonelier.
IVF changes how you experience your own body. The injections, the monitoring, the retrieval - it’s a clinical process that takes the place of a highly connected one, and it asks you to stay emotionally regulated while your body is going through something intense and unpredictable. For many people, this creates a strange kind of disconnection that’s hard to name and harder to explain.
The relationship strain is real. Couples navigating IVF together are often making major decisions under enormous pressure, processing grief on different timelines, and trying to support each other through something neither of them planned for. It’s a lot to carry together.
You’re Not Imagining How Hard This Is
The research confirms what my clients already know: IVF takes a genuine psychological toll.
Studies have found that the prevalence of depression among women undergoing IVF-embryo transfer can reach 27 percent, with anxiety affecting close to 19 percent. And those figures reflect the experience of people in active treatment, not just those navigating the most difficult cycles. Research consistently shows that rates of stress, anxiety, and depression among IVF patients are higher than in the general population.
None of this is weakness. None of it means the process isn’t worth it, or that you’re not strong enough. It means you’re going through something that is genuinely, measurably hard, and that you deserve support that reflects that.
Grief and Hope Can Exist at the Same Time
One of the most important truths we explore in therapy, and one of the most counterintuitive, is that grief and hope are not opposites. They don’t cancel each other out. You can grieve a failed cycle and still feel hope for the next one. You can feel devastated by an unexpected turn in your treatment plan and still feel love for the family you’re working so hard to build. You can be exhausted by the process and still know, somewhere underneath it all, that you’re not done yet.
Holding space for both at the same time is one of the hardest things I ask clients to do. It doesn’t come naturally - it takes practice, and it really helps to have somewhere safe to do that work.
Things That Can Genuinely Help
There’s no single right way to get through IVF emotionally. But here are some things I’ve seen make a real difference:
Name what you’re actually grieving. Not just outcomes, but the version of this you thought you’d have. The ease you assumed. The timeline you built other plans around. Naming a loss is often the first step toward not being consumed by it.
Give yourself permission to set limits. You don’t owe anyone updates about your cycle. You’re allowed to skip the baby shower. You’re allowed to say “I can’t talk about this right now.” Protecting your emotional energy isn’t selfish, it’s necessary.
Stay connected to at least one person who can witness without fixing. Isolation amplifies distress. You don’t need someone who has answers. You need someone who can sit with you in it.
Work with a therapist who understands fertility. Perinatal and fertility mental health is its own specialty for a reason. The grief, the identity shifts, the relationship strain, the specific anxiety of each phase of treatment -this isn’t generic “stress.” It deserves a space designed specifically to hold and honor it.
When the Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story
The tripling of IVF patient numbers over 30 years is a remarkable testament to how far reproductive medicine has come. But mainstream doesn’t mean easy. More people going through IVF doesn’t make your experience less isolating, less exhausting, or less deserving of real support.
You are not a number in a report. You are a person in the middle of something enormous and the emotional weight of that is real, valid, and worth tending to.
A Gentle Reminder Before You Go
If you’re in the middle of IVF, or preparing for it, or grieving a cycle that didn’t work out, I want you to know that the part you’re not saying out loud is often the most important part. The fears, the identity questions, the moments where you wonder who you are if this doesn’t work, the grief you carry quietly so you don’t burden anyone else.
That’s exactly what therapy is for.
If you’re in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, or Florida, I’d be honored to be part of your support. You can reach out through my website. You don’t have to have it all sorted out before you contact me. That’s what we do together.
Ashley Mead, LMHC, PMH-C, is a licensed mental health counselor specializing in perinatal and fertility mental health. She serves clients in NY, CT, and FL via telehealth. Learn more at ashleymead.com.
Sources
- Scientific Reports, Nature, May 2025. (Cao et al., “Factors influencing the anxiety and depression status in patients undergoing IVF-ET assisted pregnancy.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-94247-z
- PLOS ONE, December 2020. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33315878/)
- PMC / Fertility & Sterility. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4781657/)