Counseling People Living With HIV/AIDS

HIV/AIDS is a chronic illness that consists of three stages: acute HIV infection, chronic HIV infection, and AIDS (AIDS Info, 2014). AIDS is the most advanced stage of HIV infection and it is diagnosed by a physician based on a person having a compromised immune system with a CD4 count of less than 200 and/or one of a variety of opportunistic infections that result from a compromised immune system. For comparison, the CD4 count for a healthy person is between 500-1,600.