The Historical Foundation Behind the Successful “HIV Stops With Me” Health Communication Campaign

This blog was written by Cooper Smitherman, Communication and Culture's Social Media Intern. An English and Psychology undergraduate at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Cooper channels his passion and his skills for writing and research into social justice efforts.

How do successful health communication campaigns employ political, economic, social, and health (PESH) conditions to revolutionize the state of public health?

The “HIV Stops With Me” campaign serves as an excellent model for health communication campaigns as they draw from PESH metrics to craft effective and enduring health messages.

Founded in 2000, the “HIV Stops With Me” campaign addressed the harmful and ignorant discourse surrounding people diagnosed with HIV. This discourse, which began in the early 1980s with the onset of the AIDS Epidemic, promoted culturally insensitive and unscientific public health messages such as abstinence-only birth control, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, and moral judgments against those who contract the disease.

However, the “HIV Stops With Me” campaign rejected these false narratives and began to feature real people with HIV discussing how they live with the disease and find strength in their day-to-day lives. Spokesmodels continue to share their stories and the campaign continues to share resources, plan events, and answer FAQs regarding living with HIV, providing a person-first approach to HIV treatment.

So, what historical progressions did this campaign leverage to forever improve the public narratives surrounding HIV? Here are just a few:

Public discourse surrounding HIV had transitioned to a point where sweeping generalizations about living with the disease no longer sufficed. Rather, a campaign such as “HIV Stops With Me” could begin to fill a crucial gap: de-stigmatizing HIV, the experiences of those who live with HIV, and the path to seeking treatment.

While the path to de-stigmatizing HIV has been rocky, the long-term power of “HIV Stops With Me” highlights the ability of health messaging to combat regressive tendencies. This campaign understood public emotions, knowledge, and beliefs surrounding HIV and injected a much-needed person-centered approach to reframing HIV discourse at a time when political policies began to recognize the nature of the disease as an international problem.

Today, we encourage all health communication campaigns to reexamine how they are situating themselves within the context of ongoing history. When health communication campaigns understand the historical moment in which they are situated and use it to craft more inclusive, encouraging, and hopeful health messages, they can serve as a crucial pivot point toward achieving health equity for all.

Join us next Friday for the next post in our series: “Examining the Design Principles Behind the Successful ‘Know Your Lemons’ Breast Cancer Awareness Health Communication Campaign.”

For the full blog schedule, revisit the Series Introduction!