Table 1.
Themes raised regarding unaddressed areas of HIV care within the intervention (N=30)
| Themes | Illustrative Quote | Participants |
|---|---|---|
| Mental Health | ||
| Other mental health diagnoses | P: “Well I had a lot of issues with my parents…with PTSD…” I: “There’s an elephant in the room you felt like you couldn’t talk about because the intervention focused on depression” P: “Yeah. And I had to push that elephant out.” | 8 participants |
| Trauma | “It played a lot in my depression, like being sexually abused and having HIV…Like that’s it, like my plate is full.” | 3 participants |
| Stress | “Stress…and what causes stress, recognizing stress…There might be other things that come up that cause stress...and learning to recognize what those are, and how to respond to them.” | 1 participant |
| HIV Self-care | ||
| HIV education (e.g., transmission, nutrition) | “Because a lot of people with HIV, they gain weight and lose weight, they gain weight and lose weight…how your body reacts to this. I thought they should have covered a little of that.” | 5 participants |
| Illness reminders | “Cause when I look at them [HIV medication] I see HIV, and I don’t wanna deal with that, because I just don’t wanna deal with that right now” | 1 participant |
| Medications (i.e., HIV, psychotropic) | “I just seem to feel like when you’re putting a substance into – a chemical [HIV medication}, into your body, that affects your state of mind.” | 1 participant |
| Personal Relationships | ||
| Relationships (e.g., family, romantic) | “It occurred to me that people who live with people who have mental illness need to know how to cope with it.” | 8 participants |
| Disclosure | “When do you tell? When don’t you tell? When you definitely shouldn’t tell? I’ve never had an answer for that one.” | 1 participant |
| Social Stressors | ||
| Religion/Spirituality | “For me, that was such a big part of things [religion]. And then it was the opposite of being gay…Throw my religion into it, on top of depression, on top of anxiety, on top of medicine, maybe it was too much.” | 2 participants |
| Sexual Minority Stress | “…internalized homophobia….I was trained to kind of judge myself because of that. I imagine how many people go through something like that, and they don’t recognize how damaging it is.” | 1 participant |
| Structural Barriers | ||
| Homelessness | “Yeah, housing. There’s so much homelessness for everybody…to motivate them to not give up on themselves” | 2 participants |
P = participant; I = interviewer