Search results

Little is understood about the self-described barriers that recently released HIV-infected prisoners face when accessing healthcare and adhering to medications. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate these barriers from the perspective of released prisoners themselves.

A qualitative assessment using 30 semi-structured interviews explored individuals’ self-reported acute stressors and barriers to health-seeking during community re-integration for recidivist prisoners. Leventhal’s Self-Regulation Model of Illness (SRMI) is applied to examine both structural and psychological barriers.

The SRMI explains that individuals have both cognitive and emotional processing elements to their illness representations, which mediate coping strategies. Cognitive representations of HIV that mediated treatment discontinuation included beliefs that HIV was stigmatizing, a death sentence, or had no physiological consequences. Negative emotional states of hopelessness and anger were either acute or chronic responses that impaired individuals’ motivation to seek care post-release. Individuals expressed feelings of mistrust, fatalism and denial as coping strategies in response to their illness, which reduced likelihood to seek HIV care.

Interventions for HIV-infected individuals transitioning to the community must incorporate structural and psychological components. Structural support includes housing assistance, employment and health insurance, and linkage to mental health, substance abuse and HIV care. Psychological support includes training to enhance agency with medication self-administration and HIV education to correct false beliefs and reduce distress. Additionally, healthcare workers should be specifically trained to establish trust with these vulnerable populations.

Little is known about the association of intimate partner violence (IPV) with specific HIV-treatment outcomes, especially among criminal justice (CJ) populations who are disproportionately affected by IPV, HIV, mental, and substance use disorders (SUDs) and are at high risk of poor post-release continuity of care.

Mixed methods were used to describe the prevalence, severity, and correlates of lifetime IPV exposure among HIV-infected jail detainees enrolled in a novel jail-release demonstration project in Connecticut. Additionally, the effect of IPV on HIV treatment outcomes and longitudinal healthcare utilization was examined.

Structured baseline surveys defined 49 percent of 84 participants as having significant IPV exposure, which was associated with female gender, longer duration since HIV diagnosis, suicidal ideation, having higher alcohol use severity, having experienced other forms of childhood and adulthood abuse, and homo/bisexual orientation. IPV was not directly correlated with HIV healthcare utilization or treatment outcomes. In-depth qualitative interviews with 20 surveyed participants, however, confirmed that IPV was associated with disengagement from HIV care especially in the context of overlapping vulnerabilities, including transitioning from CJ to community settings, having untreated mental disorders, and actively using drugs or alcohol at the time of incarceration.

Post-release interventions for HIV-infected CJ populations should minimally integrate HIV secondary prevention with violence reduction and treatment for SUDs.