Hi<\/p>\n
The things you are describing make it sounds like you are depressed, but that you don’t realise this. Coping on a day to day basis makes it difficult to know this yourself.<\/p>\n
Because I don’t know you I don’t know if this was part of your character before you were diagnosed, or whether this is a reaction to your diagnosis that you have never had a chance to resolve.<\/p>\n
So while this is not normal (whatever ‘normal’ is),, the feelings you describe are also not unusual if you have not had a chance to talk in depth about why you feel this way.<\/p>\n
Clinical depression isn’t judged by a lab test but by this sort of dissociation from everyday things in life that would normally give you pleasure and make you value your life.<\/p>\n
If you felt like this before your diagnosis, this depression could easily be a factor in why you became HIV positive.<\/p>\n
Life is good, and HIV shouldn’t make you feel less of a person. I’m sure your friends and family would be really upset to know you feel this way.<\/p>\n
Because you live in the UK, your doctor should be able to arrange counselling sessions with either a health advisor or a counsellor. But you will need to speak to your doctor so that he is clear about how you feel.<\/p>\n
It may help to print out this Q&A and take it with you to your next appointment, if you find it difficult to talk about.<\/p>\n
You may also be able to get similar services from the THT or your local HIV organisation.<\/p>\n
Finally, if you are on treatment and one of your meds is efavirenz (Sustiva or Atripla) these meds may be making these feelings worse and would be a reason to switch to alternative HIV meds.<\/p>\n
Please also write to me off line if this would help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is this normal? I don’t care if I live or die, or become ill with HIV or get an opportunistic infection or if it’s fatal.<\/p>\n
I’ve been diagnosed HIV for just over 4 years and wouldn’t say I am particularly depressed, but I don’t care about myself, my life, I eat crap takeaways all the time and generally abuse my body.<\/p>\n
I am detached from any emotions or feelings towards anyone or anything, and I really don’t care if I catch any resistant HIV strains or become secondary infected etc or if I live or die, or how my family would feel if I did die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,26,28,38,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-topics","category-living-with-hiv-long-term","category-newly-diagnosed","category-side-effects","category-support"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/i-base.info\/qa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}