It is pretty easy to understand how people diagnosed with AIDS would be willing to do and/or try anything to help themselves; as well as being more susceptible to not only opportunistic diseases, but also diseases of the mind. The pressures and stress that AIDS patients must face is incomprehensible to those of us who do not face death everyday, waiting for the next illness to take over, waiting to die; their minds must go numb with black thoughts. The media too is at fault for helping to make AIDS sufferers deadened with their hyped up miracle drugs and advertisements of greater life; then the disappointment that comes when the drugs don't do and fix all they say they will. That is so much stress on your brain, your mind, and your physical self. There are so many psychological aspects to the AIDS virus that it is almost impossible to say that victims of it would not be psychologically affected in some way. I have decided to use two different articles in this paper to describe the ways in which AIDS patients are psychologically affected by the media and the pressures of the disease itself. The first article is from The Archives of General Psy

Nearly half of the sample used in the first study screened positive for a psychiatric disorder, 40% reported using an illicit drug other than marijuana, and more than 12% screened positive for drug dependence during the previous 12 months. Psychiatric and substance abuse disorders among people with human immunodeficiency virus infections may impair quality of life, adversely affect the need for the use of health services, impact health outcomes, and compromise adherence with complicated medication regimens. Psychiatric and substance abuse disorders may also be associated with unsafe sexual and needle-sharing behaviors that increase the likelihood of HIV transmission. To me it sounds so obvious, mixing a deadly disease and mind-altering drugs it would be impossible to think that these people would not obtain some type of substance abuse problem or psychological disorder, especially ones like anxiety, depression, GAD, panic attacks. You have just been told that you are dying: that you have a horrible, debilitating disease: how is it possible not to develop some mind/mood altering disease or "bad habit"? I think the desperation that would evolve from being told that you have AIDS, that you are going to die would send people to all different ends of the Earth to do whatever they could to make themselves "feel better" no matter what that might be. Why not use crack cocaine or heroin, what is there to lose? I believe this is the attitude is common among AIDS sufferers. They have already been given a death sentence so why not use drugs, what risk is there?

chiatry called Psychiatric Disorders and Drug Use Among Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected Adults in the United States. The second is written by Jayson Blair and is called Healthy Skepticism and the Marketing of AIDS. I think that by putting these two articles together we can get a really good idea of how psychologically impaired AIDS patients can become with the of AIDS propaganda put forth by the media in addition to and combined with the use of illegal and illicit drugs.

On the other side of this we have the psychological aspects of what happens to AIDS patients when they combine illicit drugs with the disease and a lot of other factors are present. Depression in HIV-infected persons has found to be approximately 28%. This is one of every four people with HIV and AIDS suffering from depression and the percentage is higher in gay men. Individuals who were heavy alcohol users compared with those who did not drink were also more likely to screen positive for a psychiatric disorder than those who did not consume alcohol. The prevalence of psychiatric disorders, drug use, and drug dependence among people receiving care for HIV

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1831
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)