The upcoming 4th World Congress on Mental Health and Deafness in Australia, highlights the lesser known fact that people with deafness are at greater risk of developing mental illness during their life than those without a hearing impairment.

Such awareness in the 1990s may have spared myself and my family a tremendous amount of pain.

Diagnosed with severe/profound hearing loss in both ears by the age of six, the enigmatic consequences of the hearing loss did not become clear immediately but affected the way I developed as a social being.

I have vivid recollections of being within groups and not following what was going on around me. Not being properly equipped to understand it, I believed that the problem was me, not my deafness.

My social skills improved over time, but my friendships and relationships were often intense and would end abruptly. The desire to show that I was not a problem inadvertently masked a much deeper issue. Over the next ten years, this issue remained undiagnosed.

After a tumultuous adolescence and early adulthood, I had five admissions to psychiatric facilities over 16 months. The eventual diagnosis of Bipolar Affective Disorder gave me insight to how awareness of the correlation between deafness and mental illness may have helped me.

I believe that any trauma or change that impacts on ones social learning leaves them at risk of developing mental health problems. Essentially, I believe that my experience demonstrates the need for increased understanding that the forthcoming congress offers.