Facing tokophobia: Presentation of the ARTEMIS intervention model and preliminary evaluation of its efficacy

Tokophobia, that is a sever fear of delivery represents a clinical condition that affects about 14% of pregnant women. Several variables, medical, psychological, and social-relational have been associated with this disease. Several studies have focused on the association among tokophobia and anxiety and depressive diseases with contrasting results. Literature has highlighted how tokophobia can negatively affect mother's well-being and her baby's development in the post-partum. This suggests the importance of treatment for tokophobia in order to prevent both medical and psychological complication during pregnancy and post-partum period. The aim of the present contribution was to present a specific model of intervention for tokophobia, called ARTEMIS, that integrates psychosomatic and Adaptive Information processing models through the use of psychotherapeutic techniques (EMDR, mindfulness and Hypnosis) developed from these models. A preliminary study on the efficacy of this model on 10 pregnant women was reported. The results underlined a statistically significant decrease of tokophobia and anxiety symptoms after the treatment. These findings suggest the potential of the protocol and encourage to continue its validation through other studies with wider samples and through process analyses that allow to investigate the mechanisms of functioning of the intervention.