Education a way to address HIV stigma

Turner said she alerted the RCMP about her daughter and after three or four days the RCMP came back saying they found her daughter in the room, alone and dead.

While this happened more than a decade ago and things are a lot better now — especially on Sturgeon Lake First Nation, where the community gets together to honour those who have died from AIDS — stigma and discrimination against those who are HIV positive still exists.

Many people will go to their home reserve and will not tell anyone their status, said Rose Roberts, CEO, of the Northern Intertribal Health Agency.

“At the beginning, when HIV first arrived, I remember instances of band council resolutions asking people to leave the reserve. That’s how much fear there was in the communities,” she said.

“If I was diagnosed with HIV would I tell anyone in my community? Probably not.”

While a Hepatitis C client was talking about her treatments for World Hepatitis Day this year, she mentioned how she felt when she learned of her status.

“It’s almost like if I had AIDS, I mean you don’t want to be hanging around with anybody who has AIDS, because of the association,” she said.

It is this feeling that makes it difficult for people who test positive for HIV.

Lynn Thompson said she has faced some discrimination, especially when she met her biological family.

“Pick and choose … I was two-spirited, I was gay, I was raised in a German White home, never grew up on reserve, then I came home HIV positive. I think you clump of those together, it’s like, woah,” she said.

“HIV has such a dark connotation to it, like you’re either a hooker, prostitute or you’re an injection drug user. It’s bad. It just has this bad stigma to it.”

Thomspon said she doesn’t really understand why there is still stigma.

“I live in Saskatchewan — it affects almost everybody now because the rates are so high,” she said.

Ashley wants to tell her story, but doesn’t want her name used. The 19-year-old said she is afraid to tell more people about her status, because of what they might say to or about her family, and she’s afraid “of being looked at like I’m dirty or less than.”

Ashley said she has heard how people talk about HIV, “and I don’t want to be viewed like that either.”

Being white, she is among the minority in a province where HIV disproportionately affects Aboriginal communities and she says that gives her a different experience.

“Because it’s less expected … there is such a stereotype that it’s just what natives get,” Ashley said.

To break the stigma people have to talk about it, said Allyce Herle, a mental health therapist on Okamese First Nation.

“It’s the kind of thing where, if people are afraid that they might be vulnerable, they just said nothing,” she said.

But when they talk, “people are still afraid, but they may possibly get some medical help that they may not have got otherwise.”

It’s more than just open discussion about the virus itself, there needs to be discussion about sex and drugs also, said Donna Lerat, HIV health promotion co-ordinator with Prince Albert Métis Women.

“We all insinuate sex in our conversations, in girlfriends talking to girlfriends … we’ve always done that K-I-S-S-I-N-G, you know that kind of stuff, but we never actually talk about it and have some good discussions,” she said.

Lerat has been working to develop some appropriate educational material based on what’s already there.

“You don’t have to be an addict, a prostitute or come from a home of dysfunction. All it takes is once, so take care of yourself and pass that story on,” she said.

This educational piece is part of one of the four pillars of the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health HIV Strategy.

“That’s a big piece of this puzzle — getting into communities and getting the education out there and basically getting people to talk about it. It don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, there’s still a long way to go,” Dr. Moliehi Khaketla, deputy medical health officer for the province’s three northern health regions.

It is the root causes that need to be addressed, she said, poverty and homelessness play a big role, so does lack of education and a lack of coping mechanisms.

“If we can’t address all of those things then it’s going to be really, really tough for us to win this battle,” she said.

For more on this series visit The face of HIV in Saskatchewan.

ahill@panow.com

This story is the fourth in a series about the face of HIV in Saskatchewan. Research for this project was made possible by a journalism grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

by Angela Hill

Education a way to address HIV stigma

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