The University of California at San Francisco AIDS Health Project. A community psychiatry approach to the AIDS epidemic.

Each program within the AIDS Health Project is designed to work with individuals at different points along the continuum between a state of health at one end of the spectrum and the clinical disorder of AIDS at the other. Thus, individual programs reflect different levels of prevention. For example, the Prevention and Support Services (formerly the Worried Well) Program is an example of primary prevention; i.e., services are provided to healthy individuals who are at risk in an attempt to keep them from contracting the disease. The HIV Positives Being Positive Program is an example of secondary prevention in which services are provided to those who have premonitory symptoms of disease but have not yet developed the full-blown illness. The AIDS antibody counseling and testing program has elements of both primary and secondary prevention, as individuals who are counseled may prove to have either a positive or a negative test. Finally, the Mental Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital and the AIDS and Substance Abuse Program (ASAP) are examples of tertiary prevention. (Note: The ASAP actually incorporates all three levels of prevention through its various activities. As the original impetus for its development was to provide services to people with AIDS, however, we have listed it as a tertiary program.) In these programs, services are provided to individuals with the illness in an attempt to prevent psychological decompensation, to provide relief of current distress, and, perhaps, to delay disease progression.