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Some Psychiatric Observations on Pregnancy in the Unmarried Student

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Robert Giel  and
Cecil Kidd
Robert Giel
Affiliation:
Medical Research Council Unit for Research on the Epidemiology of Psychiatric Illness, Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Edinburgh; Dykzigt Hospital, Rotterdam, Holland
Cecil Kidd
Affiliation:
Medical Research Council Unit for Research on the Epidemiology of Psychiatric Illness, Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Edinburgh; University of Aberdeen
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Extract

The health of the young unmarried primigravida has attracted enquiry from obstetricians, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. Generally, by virtue of their youth and tissue resilience these girls are at an excellent physiological age for the processes of pregnancy and labour. Stewart (1952) showed in a carefully documented survey of 3,019 primigravidae that anomalous marital status did not appear to influence the occurrence of difficult labour which in fact was found more frequently among those who had been married before conception than among either the “illegitimate” group or the pre-marital conception group. Young unmarried women, therefore, may well be physiologically fit for child-bearing, but they may be psychologically unprepared for it. Emotional reactions during pregnancy are common, especially among unmarried women. Yet in our clinical management of disturbed pregnant women who are not married we have been impressed by the frequency with which emotional ill health has antedated their pregnancies. In many cases we have been tempted to view the psychiatric concomitants of their pregnancies as part of a continuum of morbidity recognized long before. It has been shown by Eysenck (1961) from psychological testing that unmarried mothers tend to be more neurotic and more extraverted than the general population, and among women students who were pregnant while at university Finlay (1962) has reported significantly more instability than among other women student patients. Illegitimate pregnancy may be accepted as the norm among some subgroups, while viewed as a catastrophe among others. For the purposes of study, however, it is difficult to find a group of young women in whom pregnancy could be less welcome, less acceptable, less manipulative or more disastrous than among university students. The very low pregnancy rates among students in Britain suggest that this may be so (Brown, 1962), as does the high correlation between unplanned pregnancy and student wastage among university students (Brown, 1962; Kidd and Dinwoodie, 1964).

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 111 , Issue 476 , July 1965 , pp. 591 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1965 

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References

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