How do people respond to the news that they are HIV positive? To date, there have been few published qualitative studies of HIV diagnosis experiences, and none focusing on Caribbean people. Twenty-five HIV-positive Caribbean people in London, UK, related their diagnosis experience and its immediate aftermath in semi-structured interviews. Diagnosis with HIV caused profound shock and distress to participants, as they associated the disease with immediate death and stigmatisation. The respondents struggled with "biographical disruption", the radical disjuncture between life before and after diagnosis, which led them into a state of liminality, as they found themselves "betwixt and between" established structural and social identities. Respondents were faced with multifaceted loss: of their known self, their present life, their envisioned future and the partner they had expected to play a role in each of these. A minority of accounts suggest that the way in which healthcare practitioners delivered the diagnosis intensified the participants' distress. This research suggests that healthcare practitioners should educate patients in specific aspects of HIV transmission and treatment, and engage closely with them in order to understand their needs and potential reactions to a positive diagnosis. Adapted from the source document.
Preidis,Geoffrey A. (Author), Shapiro,Conor D. (Author), Pierre,Inobert (Author), Dyer,Monica J. (Author), Kozinetz,Claudia A. (Author), and Grimes,Richard M. (Author)
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
May 2010
Published:
Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The HIV/ AIDS pandemic disproportionately afflicts regions of the world that have minimal access to formal schooling and low literacy rates. Health educational interventions are difficult to evaluate efficiently in these settings because standard approaches such as written questionnaires cannot easily be employed. Describes a method of rapidly assessing health interventions among large groups that does not require the ability to read or write. This evaluation tool was tested within the context of a community-based HIV/AIDS drama education program in a low-literate region of rural Haiti.
"I knew in some quarters that linking the virus to Haiti would potentially raise some concerns, but for the better part often years I have been tracking the virus from Central Africa to elsewhere-which is the roadmap for useful vaccines and other control methods," [Michael Worobey] said. "Whether it be Haitian men and women or homosexual men and women there is no sense in blaming a group of people for a virus we did not know existed. Instead we as a community should be extra sympathetic to those who are infected with the virus."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
4 p., Haiti has been a broken country at the best of times; and the devastating January 12, 2010, earthquake has thrown the drastically poor nation under the world spotlight once again, but for all the wrong reasons. With the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince, now in ruins and the vestiges of health care infrastructure all but destroyed, little care is available to those who need it most, especially those requiring specialized assistance, including the 120,000 Haitian people currently living with or affected by HIV/AIDS.
In the Canadian context, reform efforts that address the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure have been hampered by the absence of data on the contours, scale, and outcomes of criminalization. This article pays particular attention to the following key findings: a sharp increase in criminal cases that began in 2004; the large proportion of recent criminal cases involving defendants who are heterosexual Black, African, and Caribbean men; and the high proportion of criminal cases resulting in conviction.
