More about the STIGMA surrounding HIV & AIDS

Submitted by Lynda Piper-Roche on 2 November 2009 - 7:12pm

I was chatting to a good friend of mine the other day about HIV & AIDS and it occurred to me that if I was HIV+ I would be more worried about telling people of my status than upset about actually discovering that I was infected!! What a wierd thing to say!! But it is true!

I am not afraid of HIV, at all, it is just a virus. A virus that is very manageable. The phrase is, LIVING WITH HIV!! Just like someone lives with a disability or lives with diabetes or lives with some other chronic illness.

So why would I not want to tell people of my status? Well, they might wonder how I caught the virus and attach their own ideas to that and also because of MISinformation about the virus, people would probably not want to be close to me, to drink out of the same cup as me, hug me and so on...to suffer that kind of treatment needlessly is something I would find more difficult to deal with than living with a virus.