Affiliations 

  • 1 Section of Infectious Diseases, Yale University School of Medicine, 135 College St. Suite 323, New Haven, CT, 06510-2283, USA. maxim.polonsky@yale.edu
  • 2 Section of Infectious Diseases, Yale University School of Medicine, 135 College St. Suite 323, New Haven, CT, 06510-2283, USA
  • 3 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK
  • 4 Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
  • 5 Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, San Francisco, CA, USA
  • 6 Ukrainian Institute on Public Health Policy, Kiev, Ukraine
AIDS Behav, 2016 12;20(12):2950-2960.
PMID: 27011378

Abstract

In this study, we use data from a survey conducted in Ukraine among 196 HIV-infected people who inject drugs, to explore attitudes toward drug addiction and methadone maintenance therapy (MMT), and intentions to change drug use during incarceration and after release from prison. Two groups were recruited: Group 1 (n = 99) was currently incarcerated and Group 2 (n = 97) had been recently released from prison. This paper's key finding is that MMT treatment and addiction recovery were predominantly viewed as mutually exclusive processes. Group comparisons showed that participants in Group 1 (pre-release) exhibited higher optimism about changing their drug use, were less likely to endorse methadone, and reported higher intention to recover from their addiction. Group 2 participants (post-release), however, reported higher rates of HIV stigma. Structural equation modeling revealed that in both groups, optimism about recovery and awareness of addiction mediated the effect of drug addiction severity on intentions to recover from their addiction.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.