Stigma Essay

This paper will be analyzing the concept of HIV patients dealing with stigma in their community, precisely in sub-Saharan Africa (Uganda). Stigma is a complex concept that is associated with “immoral people” or people who are termed as unworthy of quality treatment by others. However, when working with HIV/AIDS patients’ stigma and discrimination becomes the behaviour used in the community to isolate these group of people. Therefore, discrimination refers to the wrongful way an individual is treated due to their HIV status or their perceived status and stigma is when an individual is humiliated and/or treated as a cast away. Furthermore, Mbonye et. al. (2013) identifies social stigma and in many African communities this is what keeps individual away from checking their health status or getting proper medical assistance after diagnosis. However, sero-sorting has become a process HIV/AIDS patients use to reduce stigma by paring up with another HIV/AIDS patient (especially due to sexual relationships) to eliminate guilt and stigma from the community.

HIV has always been a disease people fear the most and would stigmatize anyone associated with this disease, especially in Africa. Mbonye et. al. (2013) explains how deep the stigma goes and why people continually live in fear of sharing their status. For instance in Uganda, individuals who are diagnosed with this virus go through the withdrawal stage as they are extremely afraid of anyone finding out their status so they pull away and manage or control the diseases as best as they ‘think’ they can. Another example is, one of the Muslim women part of the study completely withdrew from the public when her status was confirmed; she felt an immense about of shame and remained fearful of w...

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... stereotypes, misconception and stigma in low-income countries. With my search however, it became evident that several sub-Saharan African countries deal with a good amount of stigma with HIV. I searched under the discover link and typed in ‘HIV and stigma in low income countries’. The search was a little too broad and I proceeded to add ‘African countries’ to the search while taking out the ‘low-income countries’, unfortunately this did provide the results I was looking for. Thus, I refined the database and searched under global health to have a more specific article and I removed the ‘African countries’, which helped to reduce the search by bringing out the relevant articles. Finally, I used Boolean operators like ‘and’ and inverted commas to help generate more precise results and also looked under the academic journals to ensure the articles gotten are credible.