Autoimune Epidemic

This book tells us from a professional perspective how to deal with stress response in the family, effectively address family problems in the epidemic, and handle the infectious emotions. This book is a profound explanation of the new stress, conflicts, and problems arising at home amid the epidemic. It provides people with a psychological self-help scale to effectively distinguish the normal and abnormal states of psychological response. Besides, it also provides professional psychological assistance and suggestions for special groups, including children, the elderly, the quarantined, and the bereaved, in order to help all families actively respond to the epidemic with the power of psychology.

This is a book about life during the HIV epidemic in Ethiopia, and seeks to understand how and why the global effort to achieve universal HIV treatment has shifted away from its initial focus on the excessive human suffering precipitated by the epidemic. When antiretroviral drugs became available in Ethiopia, they emerged as powerful agents of change: not only did they cure individuals, they also helped people overcome their fear of – and break the silence around – AIDS, while healing the social ruptures caused by the epidemic. Nevertheless, as this book argues, the very same agents have silently “reversed” these changes over the course of the past decade. These reversals have dissolved connections, re-incurred invisible social fissures, and allowed a large majority of people to stay indifferent to the suffering of individuals whose lives remain vulnerable under the current treatment regime. This whole process is a product of neoliberal global health interventions that determine which lives are worthy or unworthy of investment. This book will interest scholars of biopolitics and public health, those who study the developing world, and those interested in how pandemic interventions alter the lives of many.