Thanks so much for your comment and sorry it’s taken me this long to respond to you (see my comment just above).

Sadly, I’m quite certain they were referring to your third example:

“people who do not have full use of a sense have some kind of learning/cognitive impairment”

.

Actually, the words used were “psychological impairment”, i.e. by virtue of the fact that a person is deaf or blind, they must be psychologically impaired.

Jessica, I need to sit down with yours for a while and think about it :)

Lisa

I feel your pain. Nothing more frustrating than to be in conversation with ‘an expert’ who although uninformed about an issue relies on their formal credentials to justify their views.
Very poor form. In fact if I were you I’d be tempted to judge your therapist friend’s professionalism based on this incident. Psycho-analysis anyone?

Interesting post.

I have had a very small bit of exposure to the Deaf community through a friend who is an interpreter. We started studying Auslan together a few years ago. I did one semester – you can guess how much further she got!

I also have some tertiary education in psychology paired with a (relatively) moderate amount post-university reading and learning.

So, certainly no expert on the subject but one who feels they might have some ideas worth contributing…

As I see it, being (or becoming) deaf (or blind) could have two different types of psychological impact:
- changing the neurological processes/human biology; and/or
- changing emotional/effective/mental state.

An example of the former would be how people with the loss of one sense have much sharper skills in one or more of the remaining senses. I believe this is well documented and it seems quite logical and reasonable.

An example of the latter would be Gary’s comment about people suffering from depression after losing a sense later in life. Also probably well documented as well as both logical and reasonable.

Do you think that the people at your book club meeting were talking about either of these impacts? Or were they actually suggesting a third type of impact which is something along the lines of: “people who do not have full use of a sense have some kind of learning/cognitive impairment”? I get the impression from your reaction that they were suggesting this third type, which, I would agree with you, is ludicrous. But is there any chance that they really just meant the first and/or the second?

Yours in piqued curiosity,
Jessica

By the way, I’m now thinking of changing my name to Dunning Kruger.

Jonathan

I know about that stuff because I have lived it, and spoken about it, and people wiser than I have said “funny, that almost sounds like this other thing I’ve heard of”.

It’s one of those things (like ethnic cleansing, for example) that I wished I knew nothing about. But it is part of my professional life.

Best regards, Andrew

I think one could also say that the very fact of having to live as a disabled person or someone with a chronic illness, etc, in this society and deal with all the inaccessibility, prejudice and ignorance is pretty damn stressful — and this state of affairs and chronic stress is known to be a major cause of depression, anxiety, other mental health problems, as well as physical health problems.

This is a nicely expressed blog post on the topic:
http://threeriversblog.com/2008/11/second-shift-for-the-sick.html

Took him ten years to get a degree as an industrial chemist, worked with perfumes for a while and is now in demand for his wine expertise based on ultra-superior smell and taste skills.

On the other hand, he would have walked out long before you did, Lisa.

His only psychological problems are those of other people.

It’s like pub politics I guess.

Well done!
Simon

If an event is thrust upon a person in later life they have a hard time coping… To often medicos only see these people as the represented pool of the community. These people will often have an adverse psychological reaction to that event. Only natural.

I have few friends that have become blind later in life (from early 40s to 50s). They did undergo a period of chronic depression. Understandable. Some of the medical establishment just shunted it of as an expected element that the blindness caused. Even those that should have know better.

They didn’t really stop to consider that the chronic depression was not from a direct effect of the disability but the life changing event that the disability caused. Some considered fix the blindness, fix the issue.

To often in medicine the cause and effect is taken the wrong way and too directly. Symptom A must equal Diagnosis B and hence treatment C. No consideration is given in relation to other holistic examples of the condition. Like the loss of young child this often triggers chronic depression. So does that mean that having children leads to chronic depression. Of course it doesn’t …

Its just totally one eyed professional prejudice of this type that is promoting disabled people as being only half a person…. this makes me so angry at times.