Marzieh Kargar Jahromi and Somayeh Ramezanli
Introduction: Due to increased global population and higher age of marriage, number of infertile couples is increasing. Prevalence of infertility is different in different countries. Some data shows that there are about 80 million infertile couples worldwide. In Iran estimations indicate that there are about two million infertile couples. Method: A systematic search was conducted to identify English language publications providing original data on infertility, psychological consequences and coping mechanism in infertile women. Result: For many couples, infertility is undeniably a major life crisis and psychologically stressful. The distress of infertility and its medical treatment is reported to affect different aspects of each partner's personal and the couple's life. First, the experience of infertility often leads to important boundary ambiguity within the relationship and family structure and increases feelings of anxiety, guilt, somatization and depression. Secondly, the diagnostic procedures and medical treatment frequently represent an unforeseen source of stress for the majority of couples undergoing it. Failure to cope with the stressful situation hampers females to reasonably thinking and problem solving coping strategy. The result show that with increasing psychological disorders symptom, the extent of emotional coping strategies will increase too. Infertile people use emotional coping strategies more due to lack of control on life events, low self-esteem, low social support and high level of stresses. Other studies showed that when an event have high level of threat, person evaluate it as more important issue, then attention will be focused on the emotions instead of the problem itself, then the person use emotional coping strategy more . Conclusion: With regard to the fact that certain coping strategies have different impacts on individuals' mental health, it is important to understand which forms of coping strategies are used more frequently by infertile women