'Ageing, HIV, and social support' is a presentation event by Dana Rosenfeld, Senior Research Fellow at the Health Innovation Ecosystem (HIE) hub.
HIE is a hub for research, student engagement, and academic enterprise activity related to health and wellbeing. The 'Ageing, HIV, and social support' event is part of its spring seminar series.
About 'Ageing, HIV, and social support'
Ageing with HIV introduces distinctive stressors, from uncertainty over ageing with HIV's clinical and social implications to experiencing two intersecting stigmas: HIV-related stigma, and ageism.
As with other groups living with stigmatized health conditions, the question of how 'formal' and 'informal' support can help to mitigate these stressors is a pressing one. Yet the literature on social support suffers from a failure to fully consider the complexities that stigmatization introduces to the social worlds of stigmatized groups. Drawing on data from focus groups and interviews with older (aged 50+) white men who have sex with men (MSM), and black African and white heterosexual men and women, living with HIV, this presentation explores participants' own approaches to and experiences of securing social support.
Applying Erving Goffman's classic work on stigma, I discuss participants' distinctions between support from HIV-negative people (what Goffman would term the 'wise') and from other people living with HV (what Goffman would term 'the own'). While participants valued support from the wise, they also sought support from 'the own', yet access to 'the own' varied across participant groups.
The presentation concludes by considering these findings' implications for research into social support among people living with stigmatizing health conditions.
