A strange urge to share one's misfortunes

I've just seen a report that "A third of gay men who know they are HIV positive are still having unprotected sex"

See this article on the BBC site.

I particularly noted:

"According to the survey, those who knew they were HIV positive were statistically more likely to have unprotected sex than those who did not."

For a moment I imagined patients, overjoyed at the discovery that their disease can be controlled by drugs, crying 'Goody, Goody, now I have plenty of time to infect someone else', but I don't suppose that many are as frank as that, even to themselves.

Much more likely than conscious malice is casual aversion to thought, and especially to precise scientific thought, an aversion defended, if at all by, some piece of ridiculous prattle which the more sententious may refer to as their 'philosophy of life' and which might include phrases such as 'if it's going to happen, it's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it' or 'science isn't everything; I'm interested in people, not machines and test tubes'

It appears that an unintended consequence of the development of drugs to treat HIV may have been an increase in the rate of new infections.