It is a pain no drug is capable of dulling and from which there is no relief. An unwitting remark can escalate it to unbearable levels and the people who love you most can make it worse. Seeta Rashid, who helps run Cradle, the fertility support group for the west of Scotland, is trying to explain what it feels like to live with infertility.

“You walk down the street and every woman you see is pregnant. You get to the office and a colleague announces she is trying for a baby and you think: ‘Don’t let her get pregnant before me.’ The magazines on the newsstands announce celebrity pregnancies. There are reminders every minute of every day.”

It is hard for women who take their fertility for granted to understand what Rashid and others like her go through. But one who has a clear insight is Dr Alice Domar, director of the Mind/Body Centre for Women’s Health at Boston IVF Centre and an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive biology at Harvard medical school.

Domar, 48 and a mother of two, is a world-renowned authority on the psychological effects of infertility. For the past 20 years she has been researching the links between infertility and stress and treating patients who have difficulty conceiving. Her research suggests that patients with fertility problems have stress levels comparable to patients with cancer or Aids.

Domar is in Scotland to train therapists, doctors and councillors in a pioneering project funded by the National Lottery that will bring her Mind/Body programme to Scottish infertility patients for the first time.

The 10-week programme, which teaches psychological interventions and relaxation techniques to lower women’s stress levels, is well established in America and is used by fertility clinics in London and Tokyo.

Domar started researching the subject in the late 1980s, after listening to her mother talk about the difficulties she had conceiving. At the time her ideas were unfashionable. “The belief was that all infertility had only a physical cause,” she says.

Recent studies, however, have demonstrated a clear link between stress and conception, whether it happens naturally or in an assisted-conception clinic. Earlier this month, at a European fertility conference in Prague, Sarah Berga of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, demonstrated how cognitive behaviour therapy could be used to help IVF couples conceive.

“We now know that women who are the most anxious and depressed prior to their IVF treatment cycle are half as likely to conceive as the least distressed,” says Domar, addressing an audience of 30 specialists at the Arthouse hotel in Glasgow. “Forty per cent of infertility patients meet the criteria for anxiety, depression or both. That’s four times the level in the general population. What’s more, fertility patients’ stress and misery increases as treatment progresses.”

Domar believes the reason infertility is so stressful is because it is unlike any other medical condition and because infertility patients’ concerns are so often dismissed. In addition, patients often mask their mental state because they are scared their doctors won’t go ahead with treatment if they are seen not to be coping.

“It’s not cancer or Aids,” says Domar. “These are healthy young women who have a great deal going for them, so what’s the big deal, you might think. But infertility affects all aspects of a couple’s lives. If you think about the things that make couples fight, it’s money, sex and kids. Infertility is all three of these.”

Domar, who has treated hundreds of couples, says men and women don’t respond to infertility in the same way. “Women tend to be more distressed about it and they structure their life around it. They are almost phobic about other pregnant women. One of the most common things I hear is the husband saying: ‘We were invited to a party and my wife wouldn’t go because she thought there would be a pregnant woman there.’

“So you see the couple beginning to fight. She feels if only he would get a bit more upset, they’d be okay and he feels if only she’d be a bit saner, they’d be okay.

“On top of this it has a huge effect on their sex life. They lose a sense of intimacy and sex takes on a different meaning. It becomes associated with failure. I tell couples that infertility is just a temporary insult to their sex lives.”

The added cruelty is that infertility makes many couples shun their families and friends.