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Michael Melendez, Ph.D., M.S.W., social worker, teacher, and volunteer by Courtesy of AIDS Walk Boston
Bay Windows ContributorWednesday May 26, 2010Helped the sick and dying retain their spiritual dignity.
In 1983, Michael Melendez attended a meeting to sign up as a volunteer to do something -- anything, really -- about a frightening disease that no one knew anything about and that was killing his friends. As it turns out, the meeting was one of the first organized by Larry Kessler in the living room of a volunteer in the Fenway area to form an organization to respond to the crisis.
Melendez didn’t sign up at the time to do anything specific, but kept up with the group. A few years later, he joined the AIDS Action Committee’s volunteer mental health committee and another committee dealing with outreach to racial minorities. "I was pretty freaked out by everything that was going on," Melendez recalls. "I joke now that I need to volunteer more than they needed me to volunteer."
Melendez, a professor of social work at Simmons College and chair of the school’s clinical practice sequence, has been involved with AIDS Action in one form or another ever since. He’s a patron of ARTcetera, has served three terms as a board member, and participated for many years in the Walk. He’s also served on the board (from 1989 to 1997) and as board president, for the Latin American Health Institute focusing his efforts on HIV work. He says he will give to the fight against HIV "until the day I die."
"This fight is nowhere near over, not with 56,000 new infections every year," says Melendez, who has cautionary words for anyone who sees HIV as an easily managed, chronic condition.
"I was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and told I had maybe three years to live," he says. "Then the protease inhibitors came along and I’m very much alive." But Melendez has dealt with kidney stones, liver scarring, chronic fatigue, and lipodystrophy as a result of the antiretroviral drugs he takes. That said, he is healthy and intends to live for a good, long time. And he intends to use that time advocating for social and spiritual justice for people with HIV and AIDS, and contributing to best practices in counseling people with HIV and AIDS.
"There are gifts in pain and sorrow." He authored a chapter in 2010’s Social Services and Social Action in the HIV Pandemic: Principles, Methods, and Populations titled "Crisis Intervention and Counseling." In it, Melendez details the emotional and social supports that both providers and patients need to think about during HIV testing. It also outlines the major issues that people newly diagnosed with HIV have to contend with: shock of the diagnosis, depression, medical and medication decisions, integrating the diagnosis into their identity, coming out as HIV positive, and dealing with the stigma -- to name just a few.
At the start of the epidemic, little was know about how to treat the physical symptoms of someone with AIDS, much less their mental health needs. "We really didn’t even know a way of psychologically treating people with AIDS," Melendez recalls. "One of the things that AIDS Action did was provide peer consultation support groups for clinicians working with people with AIDS and their families."
In the early years much of that work was about dealing with death and dying. "I remember just ongoing grief, of learning yet again that somebody I knew and cared about was ill or that somebody had died," he says.
Melendez has coped with the grief, in part, with spirituality. He originally came to Boston having joined a Catholic religious order. Currently he is a member of the Episcopal Church and will be ordained as a deacon in June.
"Believe it or not, there are gifts in pain and sorrow," he observes. "In this whole journey of walking with these many people who were sick and ill I witnessed love, hope, and honor in action."
This year AIDS Walk Boston turns 25. To mark the milestone, AIDS Action is honoring 25 individuals whose contributions to the fight against AIDS over the last two-and-a-half decades have been invaluable. Bay Windows will be running profiles of the honorees in issues running now through this year’s AIDS Walk, which takes place June 6, 2010 at the DCR Hatch Memorial Shell on the Charles River Esplande in Boston. See BayWindows.com for additional profiles.
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