- Home
- Disability Categories
- Autism
- Deaf-Blindness
- Deafness
- Emotional Behavioral Disorder
- Hearing Impairment or Deafness
- Cognitively Disabled
- Multiple Disabilities
- Orthopedic Impairment
- Other Health Impairment
- Specific Learning Disability
- Speech and Language Disability or Impairment
- Traumatic Brain Injury
- Visual Impairment and Blindness
Medications
Keeping one’s mental health poses a considerable challenge for a person living through a double sensory loss:
- Deaf-blindness may generate numerous consequences in many spheres of one’s life. However, of the spheres affected, mental health is by all means one of the most important. In part, deaf-blindness brings about psychological consequences. While certain people succeed in regaining a new balance, others can no longer operate normally. Thus one can call this a mental health problem and, in certain cases, a psychopathological problem.
Psychosocial Consequences of Deaf-blindness
- The impoverishment of access to sound and visual information results in severe consequences, and this impacts on the ability to communicate and maintain social contacts. The social network gradually breaks down, some friends distance themselves. These impacts vary with the influence of multiple factors: age, the mode of communication, being a part of the Deaf culture or not, the nature of the sensory loss, the education level, the revenue, the social network, employment, personality, etc.
- The loss is abundant: no longer being able to enjoy certain activities (reading the newspaper, listening to music), losing one’s autonomy (no longer being able to drive one’s car), no longer being able to stay busy at work, etc. Deaf-blind people tell us that they feel out of synch with what is happening in their immediate environment and in the greater community. A person may then feel frustration, injustice, sorrow, a lower self-esteem, anxiety, etc. They must accommodate these emotions, manage them and find ways to constantly adapt to their new sensory condition.
- Certain deaf-blind people do not feel comfortable either in the Deaf community, or with the hearing community. This will nurture an examination of identity and will bring about challenges.
- The adaptation may vary according to the magnitude of the loss, life experiences, and the quality of resources available to the person. In the best of cases, they will succeed in adapting to their losses and in overcoming the various difficulties which they will face. Others will be at risk of developing mental health problems.
Relationships with Family and Friends
- The progression of sensory disabilities will greatly affect the dynamics with the family and friends of the deaf-blind individual, who will need to deal with the inequality of sharing, their fears, frustrations, stress and uncertainty about the future. These individuals may mourn the loss of social life or of satisfactory communication, which poses an emotional impact. For example, the spouse or family may see social contacts diminish because the deaf-blind person can barely take part in group conversations, no longer feels any pleasure or fears belittlement or inadequacy.
- Therefore, it is possible to help the deaf-blind individual without considering their place, role and function in the family. For example, some deaf-blind parents may be brought to have great expectations with respect to the responsibilities their children must undertake. The parent will need to rediscover a feeling of competence in exercising their role or in using community resources to mitigate certain disabilities. Friends and family must be supported in understanding and adapting to the fact that the rhythm and needs of the deaf-blind individual are no longer the same, rather that they can and must continue activities within their abilities. Among other things, the family system must manage to satisfactorily negotiate balanced functioning rules. Information must still circulate between individuals through the use of new means.
- In order to fight anxiety, a family system which has failed to adapt could adopt counterproductive attitudes: overprotection, denial of loss, low self-esteem of the deaf-blind individual, psychological burnout of natural caretakers, etc. Stress may also exacerbate pre-existing difficulties in the family or marital dynamics: situations of rejection, divorce, or conflict which will then contribute to the isolation of the deaf-blind individual and further weaken his or her mental health.
Mental Health and Deaf-blindness Issues Cognitive Aspects
- It may be long and difficult in coming to a good comprehension of the mental health problem by forming the right hypothesis and coming to a diagnosis. That which may seem to be a hallucination is possibly the result of a distorted perception of sound and visual information. Among other things, certain people living with anxiety have difficulty interpreting the changes in light, color, moving objects, etc. These illusions may be interpreted as a threat. These beliefs or misconceptions may crystallize and further increase anxiety. Facing a world where they perceive less and less, an uncertain future and the loss of autonomy, the person may develop a growing intolerance towards uncertainty (generalized anxiety troubles). The ability to see and hear, that allowed the person to exercise judgement, no longer allows the same contact with reality; the person is no longer able to distinguish what is due to imagination (internal stimulus) or to reality (external stimulus). Reality is perceived in a fragmented and selective manner; the person may establish false cause and links to behavioral consequences.
- Having only few exchanges with others and becoming impervious to feedback due to difficulties in communication and perception, the person looses perspective on their relational life. Emotions take over, thought has difficulty structuring itself and the "interior monologue" takes over.
Mood Related Aspects
- The loss of hearing and vision inevitably generates more or less intense emotional reactions. The individual may sometimes be weakened by one incapacity and then secondly hit by another. This process may repeat itself throughout life since, for many people, those losses make themselves felt in a progressive fashion or even by stages.
- Being less stimulated or challenged by what is happening in their environment, some deaf-blind individuals may sink into a lack of interest or into a state of lethargy. There is also the risk of a major depression disorder occurring. Here, one can find individuals with unresolved grieving over sensory loss, which may linger on or continue, depending on the evolution of the syndrome. The clinical picture of major depression may be more or less severe and be coupled with problems of alcohol and drug abuse, suicidal ideas and, in some cases, suicide attempts.
- In some individuals, obsession and compulsion surrounding doubt and verification (obsessive-compulsive disorder) may also appear, as well as peaks of extreme anxiety causing panic disorders with agoraphobia and possibly culminating in a panic attack.
Symptoms of a Psychotic Nature
- In less frequent cases, there appears to be psychotic-related symptoms. In this way, people with almost no hearing and vision find themselves with visual and/or auditory hallucinations. Others entertain delirious persecution ideas, disorienting themselves or adopting aggressive and socially unacceptable behaviors. Eventually, they may build a threatening understanding of reality for themselves. We are then presented with a delirium disorder.
- It has not been clearly established why a deaf-blind individual comes to posses such severe symptoms. It seems, however, that this may be, in part, the result of the double sensory deficiency because the symptoms seem to diminish when the person is encouraged and isolation is reduced.
- The treatment of mental illnesses in an acute phase raises the level of psychiatry. We must provide mental health services: prevention, support to psychiatric treatment and rehabilitation.