Do profoundly prelingually deaf patients with psychosis really hear voices?

Abstract

THE PSYCHIATRIC LITERATURE has described profoundly prelingually deaf people with psychosis who report hearing voices. The present study proposes that such reports in fact reflect the beliefs of professionals in mental health and deafness and not the hallucinatory experience of psychotic deaf people. The study demonstrates that it is functionally meaningless to assert that a prelingually profoundly deaf psychotic patient "hears voices," and provides a theoretical structure from which to consider more appropriately the internal experiences of deaf people with psychosis, and to encourage the clinically relevant articulation of these experiences. The authors also suggest that the "true" phenomenological experience is of secondary clinical interest to the meaning imposed upon it by the client and the distress caused by it.