Towards a Social Psychology of Living With Acquired Hearing Loss

Stigmatized social identity can create psychological barriers to the effective delivery of hearing services for people with acquired hearing loss.These barriers can lead to denial and inhibit clients from accepting the help they need, even if this denial poses disadvantages to their well-being.To overcome these barriers, services are needed that address identity-related issues along with strategies that specifically address stigma.Acquired hearing loss can disrupt existing interpersonal social relations and threaten social identity and status.Efforts to change group norms within a client's immediate social network can provide the social support and practical solutions needed to minimize distress and help create a pool of people who are capable of mobilizing in the interests of broader destigmatization and social change.From the perspective of social psychology and social identity theory, the outreach strategy in the audiologic rehabilitation program originally described by Raymond Htu and colleague Louise Getty (Getty & Htu, 1991; Htu & Getty, 1991), referred to herein as the Montreal Model, offers clinicians an effective psychosocial strategy for engaging clients and significant others in a useful change process.Humans are social beings who do not experience hearing-related communication problems in a social vacuum (Hogan, 2001).Hearing-related communication problems can result in the stigmatization of the person with hearing loss (Gagn, Southall, & Jennings, 2009;Hallberg & Carlsson, 1991;Htu, 1996).As Giddens (1984) observed, stigma arises when an individual is deemed socially incompetent-in the context of hearing impairment, because he or she cannot follow the customary social rules of speaking, listening, and responding appropriately.People with hearing loss often attempt to manage stigma by avoiding practices and behaviors that would marginalize or delegitimize them.