Positive Impact
139 Ralph McGill Blvd., Suite 301
404-589-9040 www.positiveimpact-atl.org
Offers counseling and support groups for people affected by HIV, including ‘The First Few Years: Managing HIV in Your Life.’
AID Atlanta
1605 Peachtree St. NW
404-870-7700 www.aidatlanta.org
Holds workshops for recently diagnosed HIV-positive men during the year; call for dates and times.
AIDS Survival Project
139 Ralph McGill Blvd.
404-874-7926 www.aidssurvivalproject.org
Offers free bi-monthly THRIVE! Weekend: two days of discussions, support groups and presentations on HIV/AIDS. Pre-registration is required. Next event: March 24-25.
The early days of HIV: First steps to maintaining strong mental health
• Connect with other HIV-positive individuals because there’s nothing worse than isolation.
• Remember that you don’t have to change everything about your life in the first moments; you have time to plan.
• Seek out a therapist or counseling group.
• Provide self-stability and maintain routines in what can be a scary world.
• Exercise offers proven benefits to your mental health
• Remember your right to privacy. You don’t have to tell anyone until you’re ready.
• Refrain from drugs and alcohol.
Apparently overwhelmed by a business deal gone bad and recently learning they were HIV-positive, two men in Midtown Atlanta attempted to end their lives earlier this month by placing their arms underneath a circular miter saw and lowering the blade until it chopped their limbs off.
The men amputated three of their arms before Atlanta police officers and emergency medical personnel rushed to their apartment building near 10th Street and Piedmont Avenue just after 10 a.m. on March 9. The men, both of whom are white in their early 40s, left several suicide notes, including on the front door of their apartment and in the leasing office’s rent box.
An employee who discovered the note in the rent box called 911, according to an Atlanta Police Department incident report. The men were rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital and have since been discharged, officials said. They did not say when they were discharged or where the men are now.
Neither the Atlanta Police Department nor the apartment building’s management office released copies of the suicide letters, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the HIV diagnosis was one of two reasons listed for the suicide attempt.
But Mental health experts and HIV/AIDS activists were shocked that an HIV diagnosis in 2007 would inspire such a despondent response.
“Certainly I’ve seen people having catastrophic reactions to receiving an HIV diagnosis, but it’s usually something that can be a target for psychological and counseling treatment,” said Conall O’Cleirigh, a researcher at the Fenway Institute, a Boston-based non-profit that researches topics related to gay and lesbian health. “But it seems tragically that that wasn’t the case here.”
The overall outlook for people living with HIV/AIDS has improved so dramatically over the years that it’s almost inconceivable that the disease could drive someone to such desperate lengths, said Gwen Davies, clinical director at Positive Impact, an Atlanta non-profit that delivers mental health services to HIV-positive individuals.
“I think there was an active debate about the role of euthanasia for people who were very sick from AIDS — that’s no longer on the table,” Davies said.
While much of the progress made in dealing with AIDS has been related to the development of life-saving drugs, researchers have also collected vital knowledge about the role of mental health in people living with HIV/AIDS over the past 20 years, O’Cleirigh said.
“By and large, gay and bisexual men who are HIV-positive are more likely to have various mental health issues and be in need of treatment, and I think we’ve got a better handle on knowing that and understanding how these things interact,” O’Cleirigh said.
Brett Grodeck attempted to overdose on prescription drugs when he was diagnosed with HIV 15 years ago. He’s seen major urban areas develop resources and strategies to address mental health concerns in HIV-positive individuals, but said the overall state of services is “still stuck back in the 1990s.”
“The basic knowledge [about what to do when you test positive] isn’t there because there is a lot of fear and anxiety, just like it was 20 years ago,” said Grodeck, author of “The First Year — HIV.”
“If people don’t have access to support groups or drug rehab or access to information, they’re left to deal with this on their own,” Grodeck said.
Medical advances in the fight against HIV may have made diagnosing the disease less overwhelming, but many people who find out they are HIV-positive feel an urgency to get everything under control, Davies said.
“I think one of the take-home messages is you don’t have to change everything in your life immediately,” she said. “They can take some time to adjust to it — you don’t have to be impulsive.”
Maintaining good mental health could play a role in how the disease progresses in a person’s body, according to a new study by O’Cleirigh and colleagues that looks at the impact of traumatic events on the health of people living with HIV. The study monitored 174 HIV-positive individuals for four years, with each participant writing an essay about the most traumatic event in their lives at the start of the study.
Researchers analyzed those essays to measure each subject’s “emotional cognitive processing.” Patients who had higher levels of emotional cognitive processing “have lower viral loads in four years, and higher T-helper cells,” O’Cleirigh said.
“That seems to suggest that when people have major stress or trauma in their life and they are HIV-positive, it makes sense for them to take the time to express those emotions and to process them fully,” said O’Cleirigh, who also works at the Harvard School of Medicine.
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