Stigma Of Hiv And Aids

Ever since the first cases of what eventually came to be known as AIDS were diagnosed in the early 1980s, people with HIV/AIDS have been stigmatized. Over time, there have been many misconceptions about this disease. Even though there have been many discoveries, and treatments for HIV have improved over time, there are still many people who understand very little about this disease. This lack of understanding, along with fear, misinformation about how the disease is transmitted, and “moral” judgments made about the types of people who contract HIV, all have led to stigmatization of, and discrimination against, people who are living with HIV/AIDS. Understanding the stigmatization of people with HIV/AIDS is an important social justice issue because that stigmatization can result in people with HIV being insulted, rejected, gossiped about, excluded from family and social activities, fired, and even jailed. People with HIV are no different from people suffering from other chronic diseases. Instead of being alienated, they have a right to be treated with fairness, respect, and dignity.

According to Stanley Cohen (1972, pg. 9), moral panics occur when a “condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests”, and is useful for explaining the hysteria in Western society towards the ‘pandemic’ of HIV/AIDS. Sociologists argue that there was a social construction around it’s meaning and the way in which it was perceived caused by an apparent social anxiety or prejudice against homosexuals and other minority groups. This essay will attempt to recognise the definition of ‘moral panics’ and its application to HIV/AIDS and its social construction.

Since it is a disease contracted on one’s own, it is oftentimes seen as the fault of the person living with HIV or AIDS, therefore causing others to feel as though they should not be held responsible for such accomodation. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation between the stigma of HIV and other marginalized groups, such as queer and people of color. For a long period of time there was a general misconstrued idea that this disease only affected gay men or those who were economically disadvantaged and seen negatively, including minority groups.

The African American community presumed HIV/AIDS exist only among Gay white males and treatment is specific to this population. This concept changed when the rates of HIV/AIDS infections arbitrarily increased among low income African Americans (i.e. those with different social experience, the gay, the bi-sexual men, the unemployed and the poor families). The stigma of being discriminated against by

But before we discuss ways in reducing HIV stigma, we should talk about what it consists of in Baton Rouge. Stigma can become a chronic stressor that leads to poor coping skills, inadequate self-care, and risky sexual behaviors (Johnson et al. 72). According to an HIV Infrastructure Study conducted by the Southern HIV/AIDS Initiative, they discussed what the HIV stigma consisted of in Baton Rouge. After a few interviews with employees in HIV/AIDS clinics and people living with HIV/AIDS, they stated that one of the main reasons why people refuse to go to a clinic to get HIV tested or delay testing is because they are afraid that people they know might see them getting tested and assume the worst from them (Reif et al. 12). People also don’t want to get tested because they fear the repercussions of getting tested positive for HIV and that their family or loved ones might shun them away if they were HIV-positive. People should not care about who is going to see them getting tested because they are being smart about taking steps in knowing their HIV status instead of waiting to show signs of AIDS infection and then it’ll be too late to get any treatment. Moreover, one study evaluating the HIV Stigma Scale had some key observations. Out of one-hundred and ten HIV-positive African-Americans that were picked for this study, some of the appalling statements they agreed with the most

The stigma towards HIV positive African-American women also exists within their own communities; unfortunately, this stigma towards these women does not encourage them to come out as HIV positive individuals. The problem with this fear is that it not only worsens the anguish for the sick individual, but also puts the people around the individual at risk. In “Social Context of Rural Women with HIV/AIDS,” authors Kenneth D. Phillips, Linda Moneyham, Sandra P. Thomas, Mary Gunther, Medha Vyavaharkar discuss the significance of the stigma felt by HIV positive women; the authors point out that the existing stigma causes these women to live in secret (2011). In order to keep their illness hidden, they would have to be maintain some form of normalcy with the people around them. Societal stigma plays an important role in the occurrence of HIV; it can be studied by examining the results of “stigma reduction” in African-American communities (Loutfy et al, 2015). HIV stigma reduction is difficult when dealing with African-American women because the stigma of sexism and racism cannot be ignored. One of the other effects of stigma is depression (Logie, James, Tharao, & Loutfy, 2012). In a “multi-method community-based research (CBR) study with Women’s Health in Women’s Hands (WLWH) across Ontario,’’ researchers also found that other forms of stigma like race and gender do correlate with the stigma felt by HIV positive African-American women

Looking at the specific disease of HIV/AIDS, there is a captivating negative stigma surrounding anyone infected or possibly infected because others are fearful. This stigma is so potent because the disease usually starts from a homosexual and then spreads, attacking

Goffman explained that the stigmatization is a pattern of unexpected behavior placed on a person who maybe diagnosed with an illness, apart of a certain group or because of different characteristics that others may not consider to be normal. It has been said that when an individuals inform others about their infection of HIV/AIDS, there is a behavior that is endured that makes it obvious to the naked eye that someone is not accepted. The existence of a stigma, and the means for determining who are stigmatized, seem to be normal for some parts of society. There are

In society, one’s identity is crucial to one 's existence. It can determine a large part of one’s life. Depending on one’s society, one can either live comfortably or live in a state of fear. Ultimately, people construct social norms which often lead to certain social behaviors. If one breaks or goes against the social norm, they are seen as an outcast. In Susan Sontag’s literally piece, Illness as Metaphor, and Mark Doty’s “Atlantis”, common pariahs were cancer and AIDS patients. It was socially unacceptable to have this disease because it went against the social norm. Overtime, only cancer’s reputation has improved tremendously because of our medical and technological advances. On the other hand, AIDS still carries the same stigma cancer once had during Sontag’s time mainly because one cannot just randomly contract it. Unlike cancer, contracting AIDS is one’s conscious choice. Typically, to contract AIDS, one engages in activities that go against the social norm. One way to contract AIDS is the use of dirty needles, or, through (homo) sexual activity.

The early days of the AIDS epidemic challenged the cartesian nature of biomedical culture. With its emphasis on empiricism, the superior biomedical mind could normally make sense of the inferior patient’s bodily concerns. In the early 80s, though, the scientific method seemed to be failing with AIDS, with no clear biological etiologic agent being identified, and rumors circulated. As the biomedical mind struggled to define and categorize AIDS, the moralistic nature of medical authority revealed itself. Instead of pathology residing in the biology of a patient, it appeared to transcend the patient’s biology and reveal deviant sexual behavior. Instead of being able to treat or study the disease, the diseased bodies were quarantined. Even when it was understood that AIDS had a viral cause, biomedicine’s quarantining practices became subtler, but still perpetuated the social stigma of AIDS patients. In this essay, I examine the nature of AIDS stigma through the lens of two biomedical professionals’ memories of the first decade of the epidemic. One such professional is Dr. M. Robert Hill, M.D. He is a retired internist of 68 years, who used to work at Missouri Baptist Medical Center in Town and Country, Missouri, and treated several AIDS patients before antiretroviral therapy was discovered. The other ethnographic source is Dr. Daniel Hanson, a current Immunology lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis, who was completing his second postdoctoral fellowship in immunology at

The criminalization of HIV transmission has sparked many debates on how the law and health policy are related and how they both have a profound impact on health. HIV criminalization was a policy meant to incapacitate and rehabilitate those transmitting the disease to others while the retribution of the act would deter others from engaging in transmission . However, the harsh realities of criminalization have caused many to reconsider its original purpose. The criminalization of HIV transmission in Canada has negative implications on health. This paper will argue that by criminalizing HIV transmission there is a greater chance of individuals not getting tested, that living with HIV can be extremely difficult within the criminal justice system, and that criminalization does not address broader, structural issues that cause HIV transmission.

Stigma can be defined as a mark of shame or ignominy that sets individuals apart from others. Goffman notes “Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories”. (Goffman) Given, when a person is labeled by said illness, disorder, or deviancy they are seen as a part of a stereotyped group and as a result are stigmatized by the “normals”. Moreover, the routines of social interactions in society allow us to create normative expectations and demands for the way ones in said society are expected to

The impact of stigma in today’s society is not studied enough, however, it should be because of the effects it can have on a persons life decisions. It is defined as a negative or shameful characteristic, more specifically, one that indicates a sign of disorder (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2011). The article addresses how individuals who abuse drugs are likely to receive a worse stigma than those who struggle with a mental illness. This is believed to be because civilization fails to recognize drug addiction as an actual medical disorder, and instead views addiction as an act of personal choice.

The emergence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic has challenged traditional ethical values of the health care profession and this include the infectious nature of HIV, the social stigma of the disease and its ethical and legal dilemmas (Naidoo & Vernillo, 2012). Since its discovery in the early 1980s, HIV infection has become a pandemic, causing an estimated 36 million deaths (Bagby, Amadee, Siggins, Molina, Nelson & Veazey, 2015). The World Health Organization estimates that in 2012, of the 35 million people living with HIV/ AIDS (PLWHA), 2.3 million were newly infected and 1.6 million died of AIDS-related causes despite increased availability of effective antiretroviral therapy (ART) (Bagby et al., 2015, para 2, page e1). Thus the need for screening,

There are HIV-related stigmas and discriminations that refer to the prejudice, abuse and negativity that is shown towards people living HIV and aids.in many countries with available data, over 50%of people have been said to have shown discriminatory attitude toward people living with HIV and AIDS. These stigmas have made people living with this