The authors Sally Mason and Deborah Vazquez shared their experience with conducting group sessions for parents with HIV/AIDS through the program ‘The Making Positive Changes’. The sessions focus on major topics such as self-care and parenting (with consumer involvement in planning and facilitation). As mentioned by the authors’ women account for the largest increase in new HIV infections in the United States; referenced from the Centers for Disease Control. The group sessions are used to help reduce stress through social support, decrease isolation, increase participants’ knowledge about the impact of HIV, increase participants’ access to resources, and provide opportunities to learn and practice beneficial skills for better wellbeing. The author offers tips when conducting a group session, such as an ‘icebreaker’.
The article is a great source to use for helpful tips on conducting a group. The article stated methods on how to gain potential members attention in which led them into the sessions. For example, there were flyers made for each session and confidentiality reasons, flyers did not include the words HIV or AIDS. The author stated how each session spoke on an organized topic related to the matter at hand. To gain comfortable group members there were ‘ice breaker games; the participants would share information with the group regarding themselves or their family. A weakness of this article would be not discussing more topics during the sessions. The article will be used as a reference on some ways to keep group participants attention during sessions and how to communicate with members in the group.
Support groups are a major importance to women infected with HIV. The author wanted to give its readers an understanding of the relationship between the psychological processes within a support group setting and the benefits that could be gained by participants’. The processes included: identification, modeling, acceptance, and empowerment. The article broke down the process of how to manage a group. It highlights tons of facts that could help educate a group leader before interacting with the participants. Feelings of sadness, worry, despair, and confusion are some of the emotions or reactions of women infected with HIV. The author stated that often women with HIV experience these emotions which are often compounded by several other affective, cognitive and behavioral responses.
The article would be a great guide to help conduct a group session for women with HIV. The author J.P. Mundell stated that support groups have become the most common social interaction strategy used to deal with the variety of emotional consequences of HIV and AIDS over the past two decades. The strengths of the article are being able to provide methods on how to conduct a group for women with HIV and the key factors that are beneficial for the participants. There was not a weakness of this article due to providing a lot of information regarding participant recruitment, group intervention, training methods for facilitators, expectations and psychological processes.
According to the above referenced article, individuals diagnosed with HIV can have deficits within the function of the brain, which can affect memory, psychomotor speed, executive function, and attention. In this study, it is shown that early life stress has a direct influence with the neurocognitive performance, however, the combined impact between early life stress and HIV has not been proven the long term results over a while (Spies, G., Fennema-Notestine, C., Cherner, M., & Seedat, S., 2017). Individuals infected with HIV may experience neurocognitive deficits characterized as HIV linked to neurocognitive disorders, which can range from mild to severe due to the staging of the disease. Women infected with HIV that have a history of childhood trauma may be particularly susceptible to neurocognitive impairments, which is less important to the additive and interaction effects of the HIV and childhood trauma (Spies, G., Fennema-Notestine, C., Cherner, M., & Seedat, S., 2017). Women with HIV, prior research was conducted to show an increased risk of HIV related to the disease and death, of poorer quality cognitive function with women that have a history of childhood trauma, acute stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The article was a great source to use to identify and understand the neurocognitive effects of women infected with HIV. In the article, researchers wanted to gain participants that have been exposed to HIV and childhood trauma to assess their cognitive function and early-life stressors. During the study, a childhood trauma questionnaire was given as a self-report inventory to provide a valid history of abuse and neglect from emotional, physical, and sexual aspects. The women were also given a neurocognitive assessment to identify the neuropsychological that will test the women learning strategies, delay recall, processing speed, attention and working memory, verbal fluency, and motor ability. The strengths within the article show that several assessments were conducted to determine the cognitive function due to prior exposure to trauma which can have a greater risk of neurocognitive changes in women infected with HIV. The weakness is the research should have been conducted longer to have more proven results on the long-term effects of the changes with women. This article can be used to identify the proper assessment to gain more insight on the changes when the women that have been infected with HIV by monitoring their cognitive function and life stressor due to the progression of the disease.
During the study conducted by (Wang 2018 et. al), it was illustrated resilience is a growth that can help with the context of stress and adversity, which is shaped by the factors of social-ecological. Women living with the disease of HIV are resilient with positive health benefits to improve health related to the quality of life. In the study, it shows the identifying factors that are associated with women infected with HIV are more resilience due to this population experiencing more stressors and inequalities (Wang, Y., Logie, C. H., Kazemi, M., Hawa, R., Conway, T., Loutfy, M., Kaida, A., Webster, K., & de Pokomandy, A., 2018). The social-ecological theoretical structures must consider the complex, active interactions between individuals and their social, community, and fundamental contexts, and how these related factors have proximal and distal influences on health results. Individuals with a social support receives an increase of resilience that offers insight opportunities to develop interventions the foster support on community levels ( Wang, Y., Logie, C. H., Kazemi, M., Hawa, R., Conway, T., Loutfy, M., Kaida, A., Webster, K., & de Pokomandy, A., 2018).
The article was a great source to help women to build resilience by gaining social support. Women that have a higher source of support within the community can establish interventions to improve a better quality of life as women’s resilience grows over a period. The strengths of this article identify the increasing levels of stress and adversity affected the social settings of women infected with HIV, which also shows the resilience of this population. The weakness of the articles shows limited findings within the social community due to the social levels within the community as it builds resilience within the populations of women with HIV. Women diagnosed with HIV experience social environment changes over a while which affects their social dynamics as they learn the growth of establishing resilience within their lives.
