For women who want to have a child and seek fertility treatment to do so, letting go after a failed attempt may be important for their long-term mental health. A new study published on Tuesday in the journal Human Reproduction looked at the impact that fertility treatment-related factors, history of childbirth, and sustained child-wish have on the long-term happiness and mental well-being of women who underwent fertility treatment but did not become pregnant.

Sustaining a desire to have a child, a so-called “child-wish,” is more strongly, positively associated with adverse long-term mental health outcomes than are fertility treatment-related factors and having at least one child through past pregnancy already.

Dr. Sofia Gameiro at the Cardiff Fertility Studies Research Group in the Cardiff University School of Psychology, Cardiff, Wales, UK, and her colleagues in The Netherlands studied 7,148 adult Dutch women who began fertility treatment at any of 12 in vitro fertilization hospitals from 1995 through 2000.

“We found that women who still wished to have children were up to 2.8 times more likely to develop clinically significant mental health problems than women who did not sustain a child-wish,” said Gameiro in a statement. “For women with no children, those with a child-wish were 2.8 times more likely to have worse mental health than women without a child-wish. For women with children, those who sustained a child-wish were 1.5 times more likely to have worse mental health than those without a child-wish. This link between a sustained wish for children and worse mental health was irrespective of the women’s fertility diagnosis and treatment history.”