Reduction in risk behavior among adults with severe mental illness who learned to advocate for HIV prevention. Psychiatric Services

Objectives: The study evaluated the relative impact of HIV risk reduction in-terventions for adults with severe mental illness living in the inner city. Meth-QfkL A total of 104 chronically mentally ill men and women were interviewed to determine sexual risk behavior over the past month and to assess HIV risk-related psychological characteristics, including their knowledge about risk behavior, their belief in their ability to change their behavior, their percep-tions of peer and social norms about safer sex, their expectancies about the outcomes of these changes, and their perceived barriers to condom use. Par-ticipants were then randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a single AIDS education session, a seven-session cognitive-behavioral HIV risk re-duction group intervention, or a seven-session group intervention that corn-bined the cognitive-behavioral intervention with training to act as a risk re-duction advocate to friends (advocacy training). Individuals were reinter-viewed three months after completion of the intervention. Results; Although all participants exhibited change at follow-up in some risk-related psycholog