#std blog

With recent censoring of people who talk about sex on social media platforms as a means of education, there has been a significant decline of reach and engagement with the posts I make in regards to sexual health. It’s unfortunate because these social media platforms over the years have been safe spaces for people to get transparent, pleasure focused sex-ed that includes the fundamentals of relationship management skills such as boundaries that often keep people out of or helps get them out of abusive relationships.

With 200+ podcast interviews from people who were failed by their sex education, there have been invaluable insights here that don’t exclusively apply to people with the same sexual health status as majority of our guests are. Some of the most common findings that have come from interviewing people with herpes on the Something Positive for Positive People (SPFPP) podcast include:

STD prevention efforts end at a person receiving a sexually transmitted disease and there is little to no post-diagnosis support offered to the person who tests positive. Oftentimes people express that it took them months, or even years to have found another living soul who can relate to the experiences they’ve had living with an STI. Something that’s so useful should not be so challenging to find. Community fosters space for acceptance, empowerment and education through the real lived experiences of people living with an STI because it often goes against the beliefs instilled in us.

How a person receives their diagnosis (especially if met with stigma from their health care provider) more often than not directly impacts if, when, and how a person discloses their positive status to others. When people are met with stigma at the point of the traumatization of hearing for example, “You have herpes”, any re-triggering event will remind them of that sensation and in many cases, a person will do everything they can to avoid feeling that pain. This looks like not wanting to discuss this with ANYONE, support systems, friends, potential partners. Someone who receives negative judgment will go on to expect negative judgment and for something that they had little to no control over. Health care providers equipped with at minimum,. tools to effectively deliver a diagnosis can prevent non-disclosure as that person goes on to navigate their diagnosis.

Sexual health is mental health, and the pillars of stigma reside dead smack in the center of these topics. Almost all of my interviews with women living with HSV bring up the topic of them having been in an abusive relationship in the various ways described. Abuse being a violation of boundaries or absence of boundaries appears to be a common thread. Cheating partners, emotionally unavailable partners, inconsistent partners, and partners who’ve just flat out lied have raised red flags that went ignored by our podcast guests. These red flags can be identified early, filtering out abusers if we are given the tools to navigate boundaries and manage relationships. The guests didn’t learn about boundaries until AFTER their ended relationship with their abusers. Past sex education omits these basic fundamentals of relating to other humans, setting the stage for boundariless children to become boundariless adults susceptible to not only physical and emotional abuse, but also not valuing themselves enough to say no to things they don’t want, as well as seek out help if needed.

Dating with an STI (sexually transmitted infection) is just like dating. People who receive a herpes diagnosis for instance often immediately point at their diagnosis as the reason they haven’t found what they want. There’s this misconception that no one will want to be with a person who has herpes. While that seems to be the case, it isn’t. People don’t learn this until they challenge this belief for themselves with their own experiences in dating and disclosing. This is often really scary for people until they do it once, then again and again, and it becomes scary to fall back into that place they were with their original beliefs.

Consider this an introduction to deep dives into Something Positive for Positive People podcast episodes, newly shared insights from within our community in more explored details, and really a call to the powers that be for sexual health stigma to shift with the understanding that it is contributing to mental health issues. What I’m actually saying is that This blog, Something Positive FROM Positive People is gonna serve as more in depth social media posts since I’m limited in my ability to talk about sex on social media platforms.

Thank you for being here! Thank you for supporting SPFPP!

This blog serves as an extension of Something Positive for Positive People, a 501c3 non profit organization connecting people navigating STI stigma to mental health resources. If you are able to monetarily donate, please visit www.spfpp.org and select the option that works best for you, or you can just share our resources.

Most STI and HIV patients would opt to go to dark, hole on the wall clinic instead of going to accredited institutions due to obvious reasons, anonymity. Even the evolution of free thinking had failed to eliminate the stigma that goes with sexual diseases, and it shows. This unfortunately causes the exponential transmission of infection and delayed diagnosis and management. Some who where poorly managed by fly by night clinics goes on believing they have been adequately managed though in the contrary, and bring home the disease to their spouses. Others too believe that without symptoms, they are most probably free of diseases without knowing that most of these STIs are subclinical in presentation.

Most locally obtained STIs are resistant to common oral antibiotic. This is largely blamed on pharmacies dispensing antibiotics without proper prescriptions enabling self medication. For fear of being found out, some resort to buying antibiotics on their own, relying mostly on what google is saying, without the benefit of proper medical diagnostics and examinations. Often, people succeed in making a first hit on the disease but failing miserably on the follow through.

Another reason for the STI pandemic is ignorance. Most would assume that STIs are restricted to the use of sexual workers, and therefore, casual encounters among people who do not ask for money in exchange for sex are clean fun. That is absurd. Sexual diseases do not marginalize, and the risk is there for every unprotected sexual encounter.