Being diagnosed with HIV is a harsh reality to face, but fighting HIV stigma is a battle unto itself.
At the HIV Anti-Stigma Day Symposium, Live Consortium Inc. will be teaching students about the virus as well as how to help our peers cope and improve the quality of their lives.
The symposium will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., March 10 in the Houston Room, University Center.
The event will focus on the college mentality toward HIV, explain why social fears and HIV don’t belong together and ask students, ‘Would my friends tell me ‘hellip; could I tell them?’
‘Your friends are supposed to love you the most, and care for you the most, and I think you’re scared of what they’re going to think about you because you hold them in the highest regard,’ said Beau Miller, C.E.O. and founder of LIVE Consortium, Inc., an anti-stigma non-profit organization in Houston. ‘You don’t want to lose your friends, right?’
LIVE Consortium, Inc. is comprised of Houstonians who come together to provide education, information and support so those living with HIV can live a stigma-free, healthy and full life.
The UH event is the pilot collaboration for the program and what Miller hopes will become a nationwide effort in spreading the word about the anti-stigma campaign.
‘HIV awareness is essential to lessening the stigmas attached to the disease as well as providing accurate information that could quite possibly retard the spread simply by people altering their behavior. The Medicine & Society Program is glad to be a part of such a message,’ said Helen Valier, coordinator of the UH Medicine and Society Program.
Most of the time, a person can contract HIV through drug use, needle sharing, sex or bad blood transfusion, Miller said. However, regardless of the cause of infection, we all need support.
‘I don’t want anyone to go through what I’ve gone through, which is having to try to hide it and having our friends not knowing where to go and deal with it,’ Miller said.
The University Anti-Stigma Campaign is an initiative to educate all college-level students about how HIV stigma affects people from all walks of life.
‘HIV is not going away anytime soon,’ symposium moderator and HIV Specialist Dr. Shannon Schrader said in an e-mail.
HIV stigma has existed since the first cases were diagnosed in 1981, when it was considered the ‘gay plague,’ Schrader said. Unfortunately some people still maintain that perception.
‘On a more medical side, deciding not to inform insurance companies or being discouraged by medications’ side effects may hinder a person’s ability to get treatment,’ Schrader said. ‘Houston has twice the national average for new cases, 50 percent of which are between the ages of 15 and 24. And more than 250,000 people in the country do not even know they have HIV.’
Raising awareness and educating are the main goals of the symposium since there are still many misunderstandings about what leads to contracting HIV and how to interact with those affected.
‘I’m in that category where ‘hellip; the person I loved gave it to me in a way that wasn’t just me having unprotected sex with just anybody,’ Miller said. ‘You can get it from someone you think you love.’
Symposium panelist Teresa Presley is an HIV positive former addict. She said she was uneducated about the illness when she began to dig deeper into her addictions.
It wasn’t until Presley attended outpatient counseling, after nearly doing jail time, she decided that she needed to become active in spreading the word about HIV.
Presley said she even experienced stigma from of her grandmother.
‘Everything of mine had to be separated,’ Presley said. ‘I had my towel – that towel could not be washed with any other towel.’
Presley said her family’s lack of HIV education made living with it more difficult. Presley was diagnosed with HIV in 1999 when she found out she was pregnant.
‘I didn’t know anything about the disease except for that it killed people,’ Presley said.
Presley has made it her goal to educate as many people as possible about HIV through her experiences living with HIV, having had an uncle die of AIDS and wanting a more understanding place for her son to live, who is not HIV positive.
Reverend Jeffrey Campbell of the St. Hope Foundation, a foundation which provides a multitude of services to the HIV affected community, will be on the panel of the symposium as well.
His experiences as minister of health and wellness and dealing with black community youth offer a different insight to another stigma of guilt.’
‘It is not any type of punishment from God, to the gay community of any ethnicity.’ ‘hellip; Anyone who is having unprotected sex can be exposed to HIV and can actually contract the virus – it’s really not about a particular sexual orientation,’ Campbell said.
The stigma isn’t all rooted in homophobia or religiosity, Campbell said.
‘There are many, particularly African-American same-gender loving men, who struggle with self-esteem and self-image, who struggle with self-value, who struggle with their sexual orientation,’ Campbell said. ‘Because of all of those struggles, many make poor choices because there’s no set value of self.’
Though value of self may bring a person to seek treatment, the undeniable acceptance of the people we love brings a whole other kind of healing.
‘We need to foster that community of caring that our friends can give us,’ Miller said.
Would you tell your loved ones you had HIV?
‘Why should I hide it? If you have HIV, the best thing to do is tell your friends. You already got it, why would you want to give it to someone else? That’s what I would do.’ – mechanical engineering freshman Alex Cantor
‘I would say – yes. It would be difficult, but no one should have to go through that alone. And it’s important to raise awareness for things that can sometimes be prevented.’ – English junior Danielle Henry
‘No, I wouldn’t be able to. I would wait awhile before I tell anybody. Let it hit me first. I would tell the person I am dating right away.’ – mechanical engineering sophomore Guadalupe Magana
‘Yes, I would. If I had it, it would be something I would have to tell people because people need to be aware. If someone in my family got it from me through a blood transfusion, I would never be able to forgive myself. So, I would definitely make everybody aware, as shameful and embarrassing as it would be.’ – business freshman Nick Tajian
‘Yes, if I was, I would tell my friends. I would only tell a couple of the friends, not everyone. It’s a secret that you would keep post-guarded. I would tell my best friend and if I was in a long-term relationship, I would tell that person.’ – psychology freshman Alicia Ross
‘Unless they ask, I’m not going to just bring it up or anything. I wouldn’t just bring it up randomly ‘ – business sophomore Austin Whaley
‘Yes, I would tell a select group first and as I got more comfortable with it, I would tell more people later on.’ – history freshman Cole Anderson
