Developing Signs of Safety: A Deaf-accessible counselling toolkit for trauma and addiction.

The U.S. Deaf community-more than half a million Americans who communicate using American Sign Language (ASL)-experiences higher rates of trauma exposure and substance use disorder (SUD) than the general population.

Working therapeutically with deaf people recovering from trauma and addiction.

Objective: This article reviews what is known about behavioral health treatment of deaf persons with comorbid trauma and addiction.

Method: We discuss how to work therapeutically with deaf people with comorbid trauma and addiction, both through a review of the literature and through clinical observations of the authors. The article also includes the personal stories of two people-a Deaf peer specialist and a hearing psychiatrist-who share their humbling stories about the recovery process for deaf people and the challenges of learning to become an effective Deaf mental health care provider.

Demographics, psychiatric diagnoses, and other characteristics of North American Deaf and hard-of-hearing inpatients.

This study examined demographic and clinical data from a specialty deaf inpatient unit so as to better understand characteristics of severely and chronically mentally ill deaf people. The study compares deaf and hearing psychiatric inpatients on demographic variables, psychiatric discharge diagnoses, a language assessment measure, a cognitive ability measure, and a measure of psychosocial functioning and risk of harm to self and others. Overall, findings indicate a broader range of diagnoses than in past studies with posttraumatic stress disorder being the most common diagnosis.