Women Living with HIV in India: Looking up from a Place of Stigma, Identifying Nexus Sites for Change

• In order to go beyond consideration of discrete public and private arenas of stigma, this paper applies Engel’s biopsychosocial model on chronic disease experience as promoting an understanding of the effects of illness on women across their biomedical, social and psychological life arenas. Use of Engel’s approach resists binary separation of private and public experiences of HIV related stigma and encourages care responses to address a whole-of-life continuum.