Psychological Rehabilitation for The Hearing Impaired - The Effect of Hearing Impairment on The Social and Emotional Development of The Hard of Hearing

Dr. Jamal Atallah*

Corresponding Author: Dr. Jamal Atallah, First Psychiatrist

Copy Right: © 2022 Dr. Jamal Atallah, This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received Date: March 29, 2022

Published Date: May 01, 2022

Who is hard of hearing: An individual who suffers from complete or partial hearing impairment, and this is discovered by the family from the early stages of development by referring to specialists through audiometry or hearing loss as a result of diseases and accidents that the individual is exposed to.

It is known that hearing is of great importance to a person, as it is the primary means of communication that he relies on in his life when dealing with those around him, and that any problem with this ability greatly affects psychologically and mentally the individual as a result of losing interaction with those around him from the initial moments of development

A child who is deaf or hard of hearing prefers to live in isolation from those around him, as he is unable to establish sound relationships with them because he finds it difficult to communicate intellectually with others because This leads to the inability of social maturity and compatibility with others, which increases the difficulty of adaptation and compatibility with them, because communication opens an opportunity for the child to express his opinion and interact with others.

Among the most important general manifestations of the personality of hearing-impaired and hard-of-hearing children are as follows:

The tendency to withdraw from society, which affects its social maturity.

They have multiple behavioral problems

Tends to instantly satisfy his needs

A clear inability to take responsibility

They tend to be more depressed, sad, and pessimistic than normal children

Thus, hearing loss affects the family unit and the system of communication between them and interaction, because the hearing impaired needs special ways to communicate with the occurrence of trauma to the parents and the occurrence of a state of imbalance within the family until it finds an appropriate way to interact with it and communicate in order to meet its needs and requests (Scheetz, 2004)

Hence, we can say that the hearing disability is a communicative disability and that owning the communication system is a pivotal behavior that affects the various aspects of the development of the hard of hearing child. Obstructing the child's normal development and growth, so helping the hearing-impaired child participate in conversations and establish relationships with him makes him feel safe and reassured. Conversely, failure to establish this leads the child to feel isolated and insecure.

When the child is asked to return some information or respond to others by carrying out what is asked of him, he may face frustration and shame because he is unable to understand what he was told or perhaps realize by his colleagues that he is less intelligent or has an emotional problem, which worsens his psychological state. Communication with those around him It or between the mother and the child is considered a big problem as a result of the mother’s incomplete information on how to deal and communicate with him. When the method of communication is shared between the mother and the child, it is easy to know the mastery side of others, and it also opens the way to enhance the child and praise him and his efforts and thus develop a concept and appreciation of self High.

Educating the hard of hearing and rehabilitating them socially and educationally requires communication methods appropriate to the degree of their hearing impairment, in order to enable them to express their ideas and needs and interact with others.

Abdul Muttalib Al-Quraiti (2001: 164) points out that the methods of communicating with the deaf and hard of hearing vary according to the individual's need for this, and their use depends on hearing loss, and then the sense that is used to a greater extent in learning communicative skills.

Communication methods depend on what remains of the individual's auditory remnants that can be exploited to improve his verbal abilities. It is known as the auditory training method.

 Including what is based on employing the sense of touch for the hearing impaired to sense the vibrations emanating from different sounds to teach them to produce sounds or pronunciation, and this method is known as the tonalized pronunciation method. Another method is based on the use of the sense of sight in the reception processes of the situations and gestures that exist in the outside world, movements and visual formal expressions that the deaf can be trained to translate into certain meanings and ideas, as is followed in the method of lip-reading.

But the individual’s benefit from training methods depends on building a good linguistic foundation based on discovery and diagnosis with early therapeutic intervention for the case with psychological and social rehabilitation, which increases the individual’s adaptation to himself and others and gives his motivation to acquire and master more habits and skills and increases opportunities for communication with those around

Good communication requires continuous giving and receiving between the child and those he deals with, and studies reveal that all children have a readiness since birth for linguistic reception and linguistic expression, and eye looks represent a readiness to communicate with everything that is going on around them.

The hearing-impaired and hard-of-hearing children need social interaction inside and outside the family, and this requires them to possess communication skills that enable them to participate in various social activities with their companions. By having children with communication skills, it will be easy for them to participate in various activities and thus obtain acceptance from their companions. The interaction of deaf and hard of hearing children with their surroundings and their companions leads to providing them with different life skills and facilitating their cognitive and linguistic development with an increase in the social maturity of the individual Childhood studies in recent years have taken a new direction and looked at the child as having a social existence like his physical and mental existence. Social occurs from birth and is primarily affected by the family and those close to the child, and the role of the family and those close to the child is to consolidate the interaction by providing it with the correct response because the child learns a large number of behaviors through observation and imitation. ( Smith, 1995, 35 )

Social maturity is a learning process, and it does not take place only in the family, but through all the social influences in which the individual participates, such as kindergarten and the play group. And the surrounding society in the various situations it includes, and we find that they are related to the individual's belonging to society, and the culture of this society is what determines the maturity of this individual from a social point of view, which is through the individual's interaction with others. (Ahmed Abdel Maaboud Moselhi, 1994, 69)

Thus, the importance of psychological and social rehabilitation for the hearing-impaired individual becomes clear

Faraj Abdel Qader Taha (1993, 800) defines maturity as completeness and precision, and in growth, development reaches the degree of completeness and completeness during the process of steady growth in man, which varies from one age stage to another so that its completeness is complete in adulthood, and it cannot be said that there is a fixed criterion for maturity, but Maturity is always referred to as the completion of physical, psychological and social functions in general, and bodily functions in general are complete with their characteristics with maturity, which is determined by medical examinations, but psychological functions may remain immature as a result of weak ego construction, which indicates the disorder of social functions and immaturity in the field of human relations .