Audism & Hearing Audist Personality Disorder

What is Audism?

Audism is a specific type of ableism that affects both audiologically deaf and Deaf people. It views deafness as a tragedy and something to be fixed via hearing aids and cochlear implants and extensive speech therapy, rather than embrace Deaf Gain.

I know a body of knowledge about psychoanalytic theory, from Freud to Kernberg. From this knowledge and from my experience as a Deaf disabled person, I developed the construct of Hearing Audist Personality Disorder. While I oppose the categorical system of personality disorders as I believe that they are mostly based on outdated sexist stereotypes, and I favor the dimensional system found in the DSM-5 instead, this construct was developed out of good fun. If it were to be in the categorical system, I suspect it would be in cluster C, as it concerns a fear of Deaf persons as a linguistic and cultural minority group.

The Proposed Criteria

While this is primarily written from an American Deaf perspective, it can easily be understood with other signed languages and manual coding systems (e.g., DGS (German Sign Language) and manually coded German within a German Deaf-hearing environment).

Hearing Audist Personality Disorder (HAPD) is a pervasive pattern of behavior, inner experience, and interpersonal interaction since at least late adolescence or early adulthood with at least three or more of the following criteria concurrently:

Belief that deafness is binary and total: Either someone is hearing or deaf. If someone is deaf, they cannot hear or speak at all.
Prejudice to signing, American Sign Language or other sign languages, and sign systems such as Manually Coded English as inferior methods of communication to written and spoken languages.
Rigidity in thinking that Deaf people are only medical patients rather than a linguistic-cultural minority.
Use of outdated terms such as “deaf and dumb” or “deaf-mute”.
Unwillingness to read about deafness aside from an audiological-medical perspective.
Persistent responses to requests for interpreters, repetition of auditory statements, or reasonable accommodations such as interpreters, open-captions, amplifications, etc. are dismissive of the two-way nature of communication: “You don’t need that”, “you heard me”, “never mind”, “maybe later”, etc.
The diagnosis cannot be better explained by a pre-existing condition such as neurocognitive declines from strokes, schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses, or dementias.
The condition causes pervasive problems in providing patient-centered care, and may interfere with development of appropriate social relationships with d/Deaf or hard-of-hearing people.

Course specifiers:

Educator-role—the Patient teaches deaf or hard-of-hearing children, either in a mainstream, itinerant, or residential school setting.
Clinician role—the Patient works in a clinical capacity in a role such as physician, nurse, social worker, vocational-rehabilitation counselor, dentist, dental hygienist, or therapist.
Generalist—the Patient’s only interactions are indirect (seeing a TV show with d/Deaf characters, visiting a residential school for the deaf for a few days).
Ego-dystonic—the Patient has a diagnosed or undiagnosed hearing loss.

Thomas Muething