Illness disclosure and mental health among women with HIV/AIDS

✍ Scribed by Lisa K Comer; Barbara Henker; Margaret Kemeny; Gail Wyatt

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 98 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1052-9284
• DOI: 10.1002/1099-1298(200011/12)10:6<449::aid-casp577>3.0.co;2-n

✦ Synopsis

The current study examines two contrasting models of the relationship between illness disclosure and mental health among an ethnically!diverse group of women with HIV:AIDS[ In the _rst\ and commonly accepted model\ illness disclosure predicts enhanced mental health status[ In the second or alternate model\ based on the stigmatization that accompanies HIV:AIDS infection\ illness disclosure predicts poorer mental health[ We also explore an alternate interpretation for this second model\ namely that the mental health status of participants is predictive of their levels of disclosure[ A total of 065 women from three major ethnic groups were interviewed and assessed during the baseline visit for a comprehensive longitudinal study[ Results showed that these women constituted a highly!disclosed population^over one!third of them had disclosed their HIV status to their entire social networks[ Contrary to expectation\ disclosure was unrelated to mental health among the African!American "n 61# and European! American "n 36# women[ Among the Latina women "n 46#\ however\ greater disclosure was related to higher levels of depression\ psychological distress\ and reported pain[ Regression analyses controlling for age\ education\ and illness severity showed that disclosure makes a small but independent contribution to the prediction of mental health status[ Thus\ among the Latinas\ the data were consistent with both the stigma model and the hypothesis that greater distress predicts wider disclosure[ General patterns of disclosure are described and possible explanations for the inconsistent relationships found between disclosure and mental health among the three ethnic groups are considered [ Copyright Þ 1999