Research On The Influence Of Virtual Community Participation On The Mental Health Of HIV/AIDS Group

By the end of October 2019,958,000 people in China’s mainland had reported living cases of HIV/AIDS since the first case was discovered in 1985,according to the National Health And Disease Control Bureau.With the development of modern medical technology,AIDS has been transformed from an "incurable" disease into a controllable chronic disease and HIV-infected people can live as long as normal people through long-term use of antiviral drugs.However,current problem facing the HIV/AIDS groups are not just a disease treatment.AIDS is a metaphorical disease and people who suffer from it are always discriminated and ostracized.As such,HIV-infected people tend to hide their illness in real life and bear the physiological and psychological torture alone.People infected with HIV are undoubtedly painful with keeping the disease secret alone,but they are afraid of the uproar and unkind attention caused by revealing the disease secret to the outside world.In this context,the virtual community with the protection of anonymity has become a safe place for this group to express themselves.In the Internet era,HIV/AIDS groups use the Internet to carry their own virtual communities,gather their peers and gather together for warmth.They also exchange information,communicate with each other emotionally and get support in the virtual communities.How do the AIDS/HIV group use virtual communities to get support in practice?What support can the virtual communities provide for them?What changes has been made to their mental health by using the virtual communities? To solve these problems,this study adopts questionnaire survey method and takes HIV-infected people who participated in the virtual community as research objects to explore their participation in the virtual community,social support in the community and the impact of the two on their mental health.After analyzing the survey data,it has been found that HIV-infected people can effectively obtain support from virtual communities through active community participation,including information support,companion support,emotional support and a small amount of instrumental support.And the higher the participation degree,the more social support they can obtain.Virtual community participation can directly affect the mental health of HIV-infected people and indirectly affect their mental health through the intermediary of "online social support",among which emotional support and companion support have significant positive effects.The empirical study proves that the AIDS virtual community is an effective channel for this group to get support.People infected with HIV should learn to actively use these virtual communities to seek online social support and alleviate adverse psychological symptoms.However,at present,there are also problems such as information noise and insufficient instrumental support in the AIDS virtual community.The government and society should actively empower the AIDS virtual community and help it enrich the available resources to stimulate its greater potential and provide more practical and effective support for the HIV/AIDS groups.