Psychological intervention in HIV / AIDS

Abstract

HIV designates an immune system infection that exposes untreated patients to severe physical and cognitive impairments. It also refers to a disease that might make both cognitive and moral integrity suspicious as well as the patient’s respectability within its own social group. HIV takes away the patient’s psychological autonomy and control over his decisions hence undermining mental life, identity and selfesteem. HIV affects nervous system in various forms from the very first stages, producing disturbances of attention, memory, executive functions and in advanced stages of AIDS, dementia clinical features.
The disease might also be regarded as a cry for help from a body that might be currently diseased, although frequently abused in early developmental
stages, especially if it was raised in economic and educational poverty. This situation worsens mainly due to the trinomial AIDS-sex-sin stigma that has been invested to this disease, in a culture where prejudice determines behavior, privileging sanctimony, appearance and destructive hypocrisy, over reason, information and empathy for the suffering. HIV is a complex condition, a wide range of intertwined aspects, an open field demanding attention, where professional psychologists can offer a broad scope of services at multiple levels, all relevant and necessary.