Nearly everyone with HIV infection has, to varying extents and at dif­ferent times, reacted to the disease with anger, depression, uncertainty, fatigue, fear, and guilt.

These feelings do not occur in stages; they come in no order. Some people have several or all of the feelings at once. All the feelings are part of human nature and are reasonable reactions to HIV infection.

They are also more or less unavoidable. That doesn’t mean you need to live in the grip of, say, depression. It only means that the emotions are as real as the virus, and that no one has a solid gold, 100 percent rule for curing unpleasant emotions. Though the mental health profession­als can be of invaluable help in learning to live with these feelings, the real experts here are the people with HIV infection. Much of this chap­ter, like chapter 1, is in the voices of those experts.