[Psychic coping with spontaneous abortion]

Spontaneous abortion is the early and involuntary loss of pregnancy and occurs in about 15 to 20% of all pregnancies. In this study, Filipp's heuristic model for critical life events was used to evaluate general and specific causal attributions and depressive symptoms after spontaneous abortion. A sample of 100 women was investigated at four measuring points between diagnosis and five weeks after the spontaneous abortion. The results regarding depressive symptom levels showed that two days after the miscarriage, 50% of the women were severely depressed, and five weeks later 30% were still depressed. Depressive symptoms were increased in cases of prior reproductive loss and when pregnancy was planned or desired. With regard to general causal attributions, women who tended to more internal, stable, and global attributions showed a significantly higher level of depressive symptoms than women with external, unstable, and specific attributions. In the area of specific attributions regarding pregnancy loss, the same patterns of results were found.