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Hope Lanter shares how her grandmother's hearing loss led to isolation when family stopped repeating themselves. Communication breakdowns push people with hearing loss to withdraw, damaging their well-being and quality of life.
Hope Lanter shares how her grandmother's hearing loss led to isolation when family stopped repeating themselves. Communication breakdowns push people with hearing loss to withdraw, damaging their well-being and quality of life.
I remember when my grandmother started having hearing loss signs showing, and we'd walk in and say, "Hey, Nana, how are you?" And she'd say, "Mm-hmm." We knew she had no idea what we said to her. What we might think about is that social isolation is just the feeling that someone has, but realistically, we know that people stop engaging with people who have hearing loss because it's too hard to communicate. We like to think, well, we would repeat, we'd be very, you know, understanding and empathetic in those scenarios, but reality is Two things: the person doesn't necessarily want to ask you to repeat more than maybe one time, but also you don't want to repeat more than one time. And so then there turns into this situation where people just feel kind of awkward and really are not able to interact the way that they would normally. You know, the inability to hear laughter, shared stories, and important moments can create this huge barrier for people. That ends up meaning that their overall well-being and quality of life are not what they need to be.
