Background on Funding HIV Support Services

A person's emotional state affects how well he or she can cope with being HIV-positive or act to remain HIV-negative. Yet "mental health" and "psychological support" services—individual counseling, support groups, and workshops such as the ones offered by the AIDS Health Project—are often undervalued by politicians and policy makers who decide how to fund HIV/AIDS programs.

AHP takes seriously its responsibility to defend the value of these services because counseling and support help both HIV-positive and HIV-negative people deal with the immense challenges they face. As their lives are turned upside-down, people with HIV must come to new understandings about medical care, future goals, emotional intimacy, sexual activity, and relationships with family and friends. As the epidemic stretches on, HIV-negative people must sustain over the course of a lifetime the balance between HIV risk reduction and their own needs for intimacy and desires for a satisfying sex life.

But we know that the goals of both HIV-positive and HIV-negative people are easily undermined by their emotional responses to HIV and the epidemic. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness, loneliness, grief, and internalized homophobia or racism are only a few of the powerful psychological conditions that may threaten physical and emotional health and lead to substance abuse and unprotected sex.

Counseling and support group services help people weather all of these challenges. And research shows that these "mental health" services are as important as medical ones in dealing with the epidemic.

Help us ensure that counseling and support group programs remain central among the tools our city uses to address HIV and sustain the overall health and well-being of our communities. Speak out: the voices of the people who get services from AHP-and their families, their friends, their doctors and nurses-are the most influential ones.