Psychiatric Times

Generally speaking, the hearing world has a very naïve and view of deaf people. Physicians are not immune to these misconceptions. This article will attempt to add nuance and complexity to the average psychiatrist’s thinking about deaf individuals. BACKGROUND There are large differences between persons who grew up deaf vs. those raised as hearing who then experienced hearing loss later in life. The latter group is fluent in English and can utilize English communication such as note writing, and computer keyboard. The rest of this article will focus largely on individuals raised from birth or infancy as deaf. American Sign Language (ASL) is a complete manual language used by many, but not all, deaf people. Other manual languages are Cued Speech and Signed Exact English (SEE). Not all deaf people have a “full” language system. Because 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, some are at risk to not receive any usable language input during critical language acquisition periods in the brain. There is a window during brain development for language acquisition. Although there is controversy about exactly when this window is “open”, most would agree that the ages of 3-7 are critical. Lacking language input then can result in an adult without fluency and competence in any language, including ASL .