Take notes. I was a teacher to adolescents with HIV. All of them arrived with a long list of medications. Every school district creates rules like a nurse has to administer all meds, and if students are caught taking their own meds, they were expelled. No drugs. Was a fundamental paradigm mainly because we have no idea what to do with sexually active adolescents, some addicted to opiates, and this was not where anything ends. It’s the beginning. Methadone. The idea that people can use antiretrovirals and nothing else is a fantasy. It’s going to be a cocktail. These are not the fun drugs. It’s a soup of chemicals. All of them toxic. Suicide ideation connected these kids. There are reasons why some kids cannot handle medications at home. Abuse would be one.

Your mother’s boyfriend said you have to be punished by god. If you were gay, you were already being punished by god. It is now a life of punishment. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors were drugs the entire classroom was on, and these were kids, too, who just needed to talk. So talk we did. I Am Going To Kill Myself came up as a topic. Meds were next. After that, there was a lot of rage over the image that HIV clinics project of themselves versus armed cops walking hallways. When these kids see a cop, they leave. Some kids had twenty different medications. The mom’s boyfriend throws all the meds down the toilet. They came to school drained. SRIs took too long. Sometimes suicide ideation became just suicide.