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Abstract
Hearing impairment is considered one of the most important and common disabilities that could be found in any community. It could be classified according to severity into mild, moderate, severe and profound hearing loss. According to the type into conductive, sensoryneural and mixed hearing loss and according to the etiology into hearing impairment due to congenital causes as in syndromic causes such as usher and Alport syndrome and non syndromic causes such as autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive and x linked inheritance. Acquired causes of hearing impairment include viral infections (as Rubella, toxoplasmosis and Cytomegalovirus), and use of ototoxic drugs.
Hearing impairment has two main problems; the communication problems and the psychological problems. The communication problems of hearing impairment appear in language, speech and voice. The psychiatric problems that could be found in hearing impaired patients may be anxiety, depression, conduct disorders schizophrenia and sexual abuse.
This study was conducted on two groups; hearing impaired group (Group A) and control group (Group B). Anxiety and depression were assessed in both groups using different psychiatric tests. Results of comparison between the two groups revealed increased incidence of anxiety in hearing impaired group than in control group. This was explained by the language problem, lack of communication and sense of sensory deprivation from which hearing impaired population always suffer. There was no significant difference between the two groups regarding the incidence of depression occurrence. This was explained by the difficulties which face the hearing impaired groups in applying the test as it is highly verbal and requires pragmatic skills.
It was important to study the impact of different linguistic factors as mood of communication, age, gender, habitat, schooling, degree of hearing impairment, length of sentence, intelligibility of speech and listener’s reaction to the patient’s speech on the incidence of occurrence of anxiety and depression.
It was found that schooling; mood of communication, intelligibility of speech and listener’s reaction to the patient’s speech had a significant impact on the occurrence of anxiety in hearing impaired patients. Other factors as gender, age and habitat have no significant effect on the incidence of psychiatric troubles occurrence in hearing impaired population.