Living with HIV infection

Abstract

By its chronic nature, HIV infection represents a period of time where persons are coping with the social and physiological changes of the infection across the spectrum of acute infection, illness, and death. As a person moves through the stages of infection, he or she also experiences different psychological states, whether they be a reaction to the disease process itself, to social reactions to HIV/AIDS, or to the threat of developing AIDS in the future. The purpose of this article is to describe in both quantitative and qualitative terms the psychosocial functioning of infected men from the time they learn they are seropositive to their demise, and to contrast this to seronegative men. This paper specifically examines the longitudinal patterns of psychological states, social support, social conflict, and HIV-risk behavior as measured prospectively in a cohort of homosexual men in Chicago. The men participating in the Chicago Multicenter AIDS Cohort and Coping and Change Studies enrolled in 1984, before the development of the HIV-1 antibody test, and voluntarily received their test results and counseling beginning November, 1985. This allowed us to follow their psychological and behavioral patterns over time after receiving HIV serostatus information. By comparing these patterns for prevalent seropositive men with those for consistently seronegative men, we are able to observe the time course of psychological and behavioral adaptation, both before and after learning serostatus, and relate those patterns to the natural history of HIV infection in homosexual men.