Where We Came From

Collaboratively designed by a group of mental health professionals from the University of California San Francisco and from the mental health community in San Francisco, AHP was founded in 1984 to develop and offer an array of high quality, innovative services to the range of individuals affected by the AIDS epidemic. AHP’s primary goals were—then and today—to:

• Provide client-centered health promotion and HIV prevention services to individuals at risk for HIV, particularly gay and bisexual men, in San Francisco

• Provide professional mental health services and substance abuse counseling to the spectrum of people affected by HIV

• Translate the collective expertise of AHP service providers into trainings and educational materials for mental health and health care providers

The project was originally funded to provide two distinct services: a Prevention and Outreach Program designed to help individuals reduce their risk of infection from what was then called “the agent that caused AIDS”; and a Crisis Intervention and Psychiatric Consultation Service at the outpatient AIDS clinic (Ward 86) and the inpatient AIDS Unit (Ward 5B), both at San Francisco General Hospital. In the fall of 1985, AHP developed an AIDS and Substance Program, a consultation and training program designed to train substance abuse residential treatment facilities about HIV and risk reduction counseling for injection drug users and to counsel hospitalized clients with drug use problems to help them reduce their risk of contracting HIV.