AIDS and the Psychological Disorders Caused By Illicit Drug Use and the Media
            
            
             It is pretty easy to understand how people diagnosed with AIDS would be willing to do and/or try anything to help themselves; as well as being more susceptible to not only opportunistic diseases, but also diseases of the mind. The pressures and stress that AIDS patients must face is incomprehensible to those of us who do not face death everyday, waiting for the next illness to take over, waiting to die; their minds must go numb with black thoughts. The media too is at fault for helping to make AIDS sufferers deadened with their hyped up miracle drugs and advertisements of greater life; then the disappointment that comes when the drugs don't do and fix all they say they will. That is so much stress on your brain, your mind, and your physical self. There are so many psychological aspects to the AIDS virus that it is almost impossible to say that victims of it would not be psychologically affected in some way. I have decided to use two different articles in this paper to describe the ways in which AIDS patients are psychologically affected by the media and the pressures of the disease itself. The first article is from The Archives of General Psychiatry called Psychiatric Disorders and Drug Use Among Human Immunodeficiency Virus-Infected Adults in the United States. The second is written by Jayson Blair and is called Healthy Skepticism and the Marketing of AIDS. I think that by putting these two articles together we can get a really good idea of how psychologically impaired AIDS patients can become with the of AIDS propaganda put forth by the media in addition to and combined with the use of illegal and illicit drugs.
             Nearly half of the sample used in the first study screened positive for a psychiatric disorder, 40% reported using an illicit drug other than marijuana, and more than 12% screened positive for drug dependence during the previous 12 mo...