Homelessness, unemployment, and divorce among human immunodeficiency virus infected subjects in Tabriz, North West of Iran, 2012

Introduction: Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attains high importance, because of its high fatality, disability, political and socio-economic impacts. Individuals living with HIV infection are poorly affected in terms of their psychological and socioeconomic aspect of quality of life. The aim of this study was to identify residence, marital, and employment characteristics of HIV infected subjects and to compare these characteristics prior of getting infection.
Methods: This study was cross-sectional, conducted on 64 HIV infected subjects referring the Counseling Center of Behavioral Disease in Tabriz, 2012. Required data was collected using self-administered questionnaire, which was validated by experts and reliability was ensured through respondent validity method. Finally data were analyzed with the help of SPSS for windows.
Results: The result showed that 89.00% of patients were male. Mean age of participants was 37.00±8.84 years. Homelessness rate was 0% before acquiring infection when compared to 7.8% afterwards. The rate of unemployed was 3.8% that raised up to 62.5% after infection. Finally, it could be said that, after infection, divorced subjects increased from 0% to 27.6% respectively.
Conclusions: The findings showed that, homelessness, unemployment, and divorce have increased dramatically among HIV infected subjects.