ABSTRACT
AIDS has changed all of us, as mental-health professionals, as individual human beings, and as a society. Before the 1980s, none of us thought we would see hundreds of thousands of relatively young people dying of a communicable disease. AIDS has humbled us. Throughout modern Western history, there have been serious sexually transmitted diseases that were incurable. Many of us who came of age in the postpenicillin generation enjoyed a very brief, unusual window in the history of time, a time when it seemed that there were no fatal sexually transmitted diseases, and in which we thought there would be no more. We became arrogant in our faith in modern medicine. AIDS shocked us from our arrogance. It returned the specter of incurable sexually transmitted disease to us, and reminded us that nature is a formidable and clever adversary to human medicine, and will probably always stay one step ahead of man. Through the terrible losses that we have all had to face, AIDS also forced psychological changes in all of us. It forced us to rethink our relation to sickness and health, to mortality, sexuality, drug use, and what we consider valuable in life.
