LIVING WITH HIV-INFECTION

By its chronic nature, HIV infection represents a period of time where persons are coping with the social and physiological changes of the i nfection across the spectrum of acute infection, illness, and death. A s a person moves through the stages of infection, he or she also exper iences different psychological states, whether they be a reaction to t he disease process itself, to social reactions to HIV/AIDS, or to the threat of developing AIDS in the future. The purpose of this article i s to describe in both guantitative and qualitative terms the psychosoc ial functioning of infected men from the time they learn they are sero positive to their demise, and to contrast this to seronegative men. Th is paper specifically examines the longitudinal patterns of psychologi cal states, social support, social conflict, and HIV-risk behavior as measured prospectively in a cohort of homosexual men in Chicago. The m en participating in the Chicago Multicenter AIDS Cohort and Coping and Change Studies enrolled in 1984, before the development of the HIV-1 antibody test, and voluntarily received their test results and counsel ing beginning November, 1985. This allowed us to follow their psycholo gical and behavioral patterns over time after receiving HIV serostatus information. By comparing these patterns for prevalent seropositive m en with those for consistently seronegative men, we are able to observ e the time course of psychological and behavioral adaptation, both bef ore and after learning serostatus, and relate those patterns to the na tural history of HIV infection in homosexual men.