ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION:  HIV/AIDS diagnoses have serious physical and psychological repercussions. HIV has negative effects on both physical and mental health. Patients who are HIV positive are frequently ostracized, rejected, and shunned. This causes them to disengage themselves and avert dedicated behaviour that might enhance their quality of life. This project was, therefore, designed to appraise the stigma enduring practices among HIV positive patients attending a auxiliary health care amenity in Benin City.

METHODS: The exercise was carried out at the Anti-retroviral Clinic of Central Hospital in Benin City, Edo State. HIV positive patients visiting the Anti-retroviral Clinic were recruited consecutively for the study. A cross-sectional study to assess patients’ stigma coping practices was conducted using a carefully designed 26-item questionnaire (from literature review) administered to 400 HIV positive patients. The data collected were posted into Microsoft Excel and studied with the aid of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software (version 20) for definitive statistics and Graphpad instat (version 3.0) for inferential statistics.

RESULTS: About 41.2% of the respondents reported that they have experienced some form of stigmatization. Majority, 352 (85.2%) of the respondents disclosed that their hoseholds were in cognizant of their status and 330 (79.9%) were supportive. The respondents did not have negative feelings because of their HIV positive status. Only a few of them 95 (23%) blame themselves for their status and had low self-esteem 27 (6.5%). Some, 148 (35%) of the respondents reported that they were blackmailed because of their status and 62 (14.9%) of the respondents suffered from sexual rejection. Viewing HIV as a manageable condition was the most frequently mentioned coping strategy reported by the respondents (172, 41.6%). This was followed by self-encouragement (169, 40.9%), seeking spiritual guidance (137, 33.2%) and refusal to disclose their status (110, 17.7%).

CONCLUSION: The major types of stigmas faced by the HIV patients in the study were mainly blackmail and sexual rejection. The main coping methods were; seeing the disease as a manageable condition and self-encouragement. Others were seeking spiritual guidance and refusal to disclose their status.

Keywords: HIV positive; stigma; coping strategies; anti-retroviral.