#People living with HIV

[worldaidsday]

Launch of World AIDS Day Report 2024—Take The Rights Path.

Launch of World AIDS Day Report 2024—Take The Rights Path

Watch the UNAIDS - Press Conference: Launch of World AIDS Day Report 2024!

[hivinfo]

Depression in People Living with HIV

Depression in People Living with HIV

Depression is a mental health condition that affects millions of people worldwide. It is characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness. Depression can occur in anyone, regardless of age, gender, race, or social status. However, it is more common in people living with chronic illnesses such as HIV.

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) is a virus that attacks the immune system, leaving the infected person vulnerable to infections and illnesses. HIV can be transmitted through unprotected sexual intercourse, sharing needles, and from mother to child during childbirth or breastfeeding. There is currently no cure for HIV, but with proper treatment, people living with HIV can manage the virus and live long, healthy lives.

Depression is a common mental health condition in people living with HIV. In fact, studies have shown that people living with HIV are twice as likely to experience depression than the general population. Depression can have a significant impact on the physical and emotional well-being of people with HIV, affecting their ability to manage their illness and adhere to their treatment.

Symptoms of Depression in People Living with HIV

Depression can present itself in different ways in people living with HIV. Some common symptoms include:

Persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness

Loss of interest in activities that were once enjoyable

Fatigue and lack of energy

Difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much

Appetite changes

Difficulty concentrating or making decisions

Thoughts of death or suicide

It is important to note that not everyone with depression experiences all of these symptoms. Additionally, some of these symptoms can also be caused by HIV itself or the medication used to treat it. It is essential to speak with a healthcare provider to receive a proper diagnosis and treatment.

Causes of Depression in People Living with HIV

There is no single cause of depression in people living with HIV. It is often a combination of factors that contribute to the development of the condition. Some of these factors include:

Social isolation: People living with HIV may experience social isolation due to the stigma and discrimination associated with the virus. This isolation can lead to feelings of loneliness, which can contribute to depression.

Chronic stress: Living with a chronic illness like HIV can be stressful. Stress can trigger the release of hormones that can contribute to the development of depression.

Neurological changes: HIV can cause neurological changes that can contribute to depression. For example, HIV can affect the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain, which can impact mood and emotional well-being.

Medication side effects: Some medications used to treat HIV can have side effects that contribute to depression. For example, some medications can cause fatigue or changes in appetite, which can impact mood.

Read more: https://www.testdepression.org

[blackmetalsnake]

I just watched the last episode of the Fellow Travellers.

I'm dead. Thank you.

[dittolicous]

sighs. i have had so much free time because of my cut hours but its. still left me with nothing to do, since i have to save as much money as possible while looking for another job. so i sleep, wake up, look to see if there are any new job postings on indeed/linkedin/ziprecruit/monster/etc, dig farther into google for more sketchy job openings, think about what company sites i can check for direct jobs, check those sketchy 'surveys for money' sites,... and then i go back to sleep. because well. cant be hungry or waste money if ur asleep.

i just. im miserable. i have so much time but i cant even enjoy or use it because im going to start bleeding money i dont have soon. im fucking terrified of not being able to find a new job, of being stuck in this... dead end job. unable to get off this damn island. it makes me sick. so im bored and guilty and scared and i just gucking hate this!

im so fuckibg tired of living in this godforsaken world where you only deserve to live if you give up everything. honestly, i wish someone would just. fuckibg come beat me up. wish my parents had actually fucking hit me instead of just yelling and insults. wish i was missing limbs or brain fuction or just. anything. anything to get the world to see i cant function.

im an empty brained idiot. i dont have any passion or self. how am i suppose to live? id rather be a fucking shattered glass than an empty jar. but thats what i am.

god i just. how???? how????? how do people... live????? how do you create and make.... your brand or personality? i cant make any of that. im just here. breathing. not for any reason. thats how its always been. everytime i see jokes about what kind of 'weird kid' you were i want to cry. because ive never been fucking anything! i wasnt a horse girl or a cat girl or train person or dinosaur nut or a monster fan and never cared about Egypt or rome or didnt care for legos or cars or model building or WHATEVER. ive just! been here! with nothing! im not ANYTHING. i dont have hobbys. ive nev r had hobbies.

ive always been alone and empty. disconnected from the world. disconnected from the community. disconnected from everyone.

my life is nothing. has been nothing. just a waste of time and space. nothing to show but misery and anger. theres no escaping it. i wish i was an actual person instead of this empty sack of nothing.

get hobbies they say, thatll help, yeah surs. sure. hobbies. to store in my roach and rat infested house, where i hide away in a tiny room because its the only space i have that i can control. with the money that i dont have. alone. because im terrible at bonding with people. because why would any human wanna hang around me? and because i tire so fucking fast.

i just. i wish i was fucking dead. im tired of this stupid fucking world. thinking things might get bettrr jusy to have reality forced into my face. im a piece of garbage npc who would have been better never being born.

[showing0resultsforsanity]

Internet Archive page

also, pages+guidelines for all the aforementioned affected topics have been reinstalled

(X)

[klimanaturali]

OS 20 PAÍSES EUROPEUS COM MAIS PESSOAS VIVENDO COM HIV/AIDS

[leadmeastraylittlefairy]

what a fucking day to work a (partially) federally funded job

[firefly-fez]

Say what you will about our universe, at least we live in a world where mosquitos can't transmit HIV.

[millionmovieproject]

NEW EPISODE ALERT!

In this episode of Social Contract, Jared and Nicolette are in holiday mode, and spend a good portion of the show giggling about egg nog and clear pumpkin pie. China's development of eco-friendly, high yield iron and steel production, a cure for HIV, Luigi, CNN faking stories, and other things are also discussed.

[worldaidsday]

2024 World AIDS Day report — Take the rights path - Press Conference.

Press conference by Angeli Achrekar, Deputy Executive Director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), on the launch of the 2024 World AIDS Day report: Take the rights path.

Watch the 2024 World AIDS Day report — Take the rights path - Press Conference!

[lorenzobane]

I know there is no end to horrible news we're getting out of the White House these days, and so many people are suffering. But this is really important and so monstrously, horrifically evil that it is making my stomach turn.

They want to defund and eliminate PEPFAR. If you don't know what PEPFAR is, it is a program that funds HIV/AIDS treatment in poor countries. "As of September 30, 2024 , PEPFAR has enabled 7.8 million babies to be born HIV-free to mothers living with HIV. The program has also provided critical care and support for 6.6 million orphans, vulnerable children, and their caregivers so they can survive and thrive."

This was actually a program started by GWB and was literally the only good thing he ever did. And it has helped so many people. This is just. Beyond evil. Beyond cruel. Even if they have the medicine from PEPFAR at clinics, they're not allowed to distribute it.

They've already paused it. Doctors are worried that it will create a new treatment-resistant form of HIV because it'll be pausing treatment for so many people.

This program has saved 26 MILLION lives.

It has such a tiny, tiny part of the budget. Them cutting this program will do nothing to balance the budget. There is no logical reason for this except abject cruelty. Please, please, please call your lawmakers- especially if you have Republican Senators and House members. Remind them that this was a program created by a Republican president.

I don't even know. I just. We can't just let it die in darkness. At the very least, spread the word. Talk to your normie friends about this. Talk to your non-political friends and ask them if they think a program that makes up less than 1% of the budget should be cut if it has saved MILLIONS of lives. We may fail but we shouldn't let it die without a fight.

Here is a link to find your House member: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

And your Senator: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

[starlightseraph]

house md will always be remebered as the most insane thing ever broadcast because of how unabashedly feral everyone involved was.

a short collection of things that happen on the show, just off the top of my head, not even scratching the surface:

- house shoots a random dead body in the morgue and then sticks him in an mri machine, which pulls the bullet out of the dead guy’s head and destroys the machine, costing the hospital millions

- foreman gets bitten by a person with rabies

- chase kills an african dictator

- cameron steals drugs from a patient after possibly getting hiv from said patient

- house induces a migraine and then takes a drug made by his arch nemesis (who he’s been stalking for 25 years) to get the drug taken off the market. he then takes lsd (in the hospital, in the middle of a case) to cure the migraine.

- chase goes into anaphylaxis after doing body shots

- house stops an elevator so he can perform a cavity (vaginal) search on a teenage heart transplant patient who’s in cardiorespiratory arrest

- they give a neurosurgeon mushrooms to cure his food poisoning, then they stick him in an operating room. the neurosurgeon strips in front of a health board assessor.

- kutner dies for gay marriage

- house sets an autopsy room on fire while trying to juggle flaming bottles

- house gets recruited by the cia

- taub gets held at gun point after diagnosing a stripper with skin cancer

- in almost every single episode, the team breaks into multiple houses

- house fakes terminal brain cancer so he can get drugs implanted directly into the pleasure centre of his brain

- house cons us immigration to get his fake wife a green card. he also uses his fake wife’s ukrainian food truck to spy on people

- house tries to get wilson, his closet case boybestfriend, into bed every few episodes. every other sentence out of house’s mouth is about wanting to rail wilson.

- taub has a kid with his ex-wife, after they divorce, at the same time he has a kid with his 25 yo side piece. the kids’ names are sophie and sophia.

- house and wilson have a bet on who can hide a chicken in the hospital the longest without anyone finding out

- house tries to kill himself like 6 times and always fails (insulin shock, overdoses, electrocution, jumping off a building, cutting, etc)

- house fakes his death to get out of a prison sentence after violating his parole so he can live out his bi love story with his gay best friend who has 5 months to live

[uncanny-tranny]

This is completely on-topic, and I imagine that Hodson from the above tweet would be very encouraged that the younger generation looks to people like him as inspirational mentors for living a queer life beyond the age we are "supposed" to live to.

Too many of us were taken too soon. We remember them, and we also remember that queerness can't be erased. A future for you, for your community, for your livelihoods is all possible, and there is hope that you will live - that despite everything, it's still you. It's important to highlight grief and hope that we have.

Not a day goes by where I do not think about the advent of medicine like PrEP and wonder just what the people - especially queer people - who passed from HIV/AIDs during the AIDs crisis would think

And then, I read this survivor's testimony and it just makes me emotional. I think this is the closest answer we have. HIV has changed, and we must always remember the people who didn't see that change before it happened.

[liminalweirdo]

"We all deserve the right to protect and keep ourselves safe. Implementing a mask ban is not only an infringement on our human rights but also extremely ableist and inconsiderate of those disabled or immunocompromised.

. . .

About 1 in 5 adult New Yorkers have a disability. If a mask ban were to be implemented, spaces such as stores and restaurants might ban masking or set up mask-removal policy. That’s 1 in 5 adults no longer able to shop in public along with others, or participate in gatherings.

Forcing immunocompromised people to remove their face masks would likely violate the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and the New York State Human Rights Law. As a member of ACT UP NY, it’s always my goal to fight for human rights such as healthcare.

Those that are HIV+ are 8% more likely to be hospitalized due to COVlD than those that aren’t and are also at an increased risk of developing Long COVlD.

Masking SAVES LIVES. Masking is community care.”

Behind the Powecom KN95 is Serita @_seritasargent_ and her friend Bri’anna @lanoirede.jpg holding the #StopMaskBans sign.

MaskTogetherAmerica encourages everyone to speak up and write to elected officials to demand they oppose the anti-mask bills S9867/A10057 and S9194! We need to defend our right to masks.

[kerri-but-horny]

I just cranked my hog to something that was probably bugchaser crap. I want to jump into a spike pit.

[grison-in-space]

from the number of asinine complaints about how "voting is NOT a form of harm reduction" because harm reduction is for ADDICTS! ONLY! I'm seeing around... all coming from OP blogs I don't recognize and which otherwise don't have much presence... well, that coordination alongside the timing of US politics sure feels like the Russian troll bots agitating again. (Yes, they absolutely infested Tumblr; I think @ms-demeanor had a great post about what the bots looked and felt like somewhere that I will have to try and track down tomorrow.)

The thing is, if you actually do know harm reduction well, the complaint makes no sense. It's not as if the origin of harm reduction is a secret or especially hard to find out more about. I am not exactly an expert in the field: I have a educated layperson's interest in public health and infectious disease, I'm a queer feminist of a certain age and therefore have a certain degree of familiarity with AIDS-driven safer sex campaigns, and I'm interested in disability history and self advocacy (and I would in fact clarify harm reduction as a philosophy under this umbrella). So I have about twenty years of experience with harm reduction as a philosophy basically by existing in communities whose history is intertwined with harm reduction, which means I know it well from many different angles, and I know how the story of the philosophy is generally taught.

See, this is a story that starts, as so many stories do, in the 1980s with something monstrous President Reagan was doing. In this case, it was the AIDS epidemic, and Reagan refusing to devote any money or time to what eventually became called AIDS (rather than the original GRIDS, which came with its own baked in homophobia). Knowing themselves abandoned by society in this as in all things, and watching as friends and loved ones died in droves, queers and addicts are two communities who see that they are the only resources that they collectively have to save each other's lives. Queers know that sex, even casual sex, is an important part of people's lives and culture... and people aren't going to stop doing it even if there's a disease, so how can it happen safely? Condoms. Condoms every time, freely available, easy and shameless, shower them on people in the street if you have to. (And other things: this is the origin of the concept of "fluid bonding", for example... both of which were concepts that were immediately adopted in response to COVID, like outdoor socially distsnced greetings and masks and "bubbles." That wasn't an accident. Normalizing sexual health tests and seeing hard results on paper before sex was a thing, too.)

Addicts, too, knew that using was going to happen no matter how earnestly people tried to stop. If it was that easy, addiction wouldn't exist. So: how do you make using safer for longer? If you could stop someone getting HIV before they could bring themselves to get clean, that's a whole life right there. If you could stop someone overdosing once, twice, a dozen times, that's more time you're buying them to claw themselves out of addiction and into a better place. Addicts see, right, needle sharing is getting the diseases spread, so cut down on needle sharing. Well, needles aren't easy to get hold of. Their supply is controlled because people who aren't prescribed needles are theoretically junkies, so taking the needles away makes it harder to use, right— and no one is complicit, and also you see fewer discarded needles lying around where they're unsanitary and unsafe, right? Except that people want to do a buddy a good turn, so they share if there's no other option, and they'll keep a needle going until it's literally too blunt to keep using if need be. So fighting needle sharing means making it easier to get needles to shoot up with: finding a place to discard used ones and get as many fresh ones as you need to use safely!

Making free needles available to junkies and free condoms for the bathhouses was not a popular solution with politicians, for perhaps obvious reasons. Nor was routine testing of the blood supply, because that cost money too. But these things work to stop the spread of disease. Thus the principle of harm reduction: policy interventions in response to communities that frequently engage in risky behavior should focus on whatever reduces aggregate harm by reducing the risk rather than by trying to reduce the behavior. The homos and junkies say look, all your societal judgement in the world hasn't stopped us being homos and junkies yet. You ain't going to look after us? We'll look after our own. And this is the form that takes. Not increasing the pressure to act like people who aren't is, but making it safer to be the people we are while we try to be the happiest versions of ourselves. Even if that means being morally complicit in a whole lot of casual sex and drug abuse.

The thing is, harm reduction is a philosophy rooted in the defiance of people who knew that their society thought they deserved to die painfully, young, invisible and alone. This is not the kind of thing that people come up with and get mad if you adapt it and share it, especially if you tell the story of where it came from. And importantly, harm reduction is not purely the child of addiction: that philosophy, from the get go, was cooked up to apply both to substance abuse and casual sex. It didn't just spread from addiction care; it was born straddling addiction care and queer & feminist health care.

So it doesn't make sense to see actual activists who know harm reduction well complaining that this is a term exhibiting semantic drift when we talk about voting as harm reduction. It's actually a good metaphor: you're reducing the overall risk of the worst case scenario metaphors by voting Democrat, at least until future votes can install a system where multiple parties can flourish on the political scheme. (Democrats and Republicans are essentially coalitions of a pack of arguing factions anyway, and those factions are essentially what would be classed elsewhere as a party in its own right; the US essentially just lumps political granularity rather than splitting it in our political system.) And anyone who understands harm reduction itself knows that.

So it's this wildly inorganic complaint being voiced repeatedly by different sources. Sounds like a pretty good flag for a potential psyop to me.

If you want to learn more about harm reduction and its history, especially from an addiction perspective, I cannot recommend Maia Szalavitz's Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction (2022) highly enough. Szalavitz has a history of addiction of her own as well as being a clear and accessible writer with an excellent grasp of neuroscience and history. I have a lot of respect for her work.