Children of AIDS Face Mental Health Needs
07 June 2011
A 2003 photo of Pascazia Mukamana of southwestern Rwanda, who quit school to raise her three siblings after their mother died from AIDS
This is the VOA Special English Health Report.
Thirty years ago this week, public health officials in the United States reported on the first cases of what came to be known as AIDS. There is growing progress against the epidemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
But today an estimated sixteen and a half million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Most of them live in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions more live with adults who are sick from AIDS.
Lucie Cluver from Oxford University in England has studied AIDS orphans and children living with sick adults in South Africa. She says children can be deeply affected by their experiences.
LUCIE CLUVER: "And one of the biggest impacts we see is mental health, their psychological health. So, for example, we see that AIDS orphaned children have very much higher levels of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder than children who have a live parent or children whose parents have died of other causes, including homicide or suicide.”
Lucie Cluver has just written about this problem in the journal Nature. She says children have to live with the stigma, the sense of shame connected to AIDS. Many are bullied at school or excluded from the community.
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