Mental health and living with HIV: need for integrated services
Mental and physical health are interrelated. For example, people living with and at risk of HIV often experience depression or other mental health conditions.
When mental health conditions and HIV occur together, declining health is more likely, as is reduced HIV treatment adherence, drug-resistance, and community transmission.
Several low-cost, evidence-based community mental health interventions exist which offer a proven, cost-effective way to prevent declining health due to the co-occurrence of these conditions. WHO recommends that countries develop integrated services that tackle both mental health and HIV together.
