Preventing and Counselling LDS

Simon Kollien & Sofia Wegner

This workshop will focus on prevention and counseling to avoid language deprivation in people who lack sufficient ability to receive spoken language. Due to many unfavorable conditions, implementing prevention and counseling often fails. Among these is the neglect of the importance of sign language in early intervention and medical counseling and the need for more resources. The current social conditions do not provide reliable protection for sign language support after the diagnosis.

This workshop is designed to be open-ended. We define “prevention of linguistic deprivation” and discuss what corresponding measures might look like. We also share practical experiences and discuss aspects of prevention at different levels, e.g., in the form of home sign language courses, including the topic in early intervention centers, medical consultations, and socio-educational or language diagnostic support.

What can psychology contribute to this? What should counseling concepts and preventive measures specifically include? How can fears of contact and loss be reduced in insecure parents? What could staffing in the form of mixed teams look like? In addition, current and potential resources for supporting preventive work based on the German Social Code and other legal frameworks will be examined. From this, we will derive language, educational, and socio-political guidelines and formulate minimum social conditions for successful prevention. 

Treatment of LDS in Inpatient and Outpatient Psychotherapy

Dr. Ulrike Gotthardt & Cathrin Jürgensen-Böttcher 

At the beginning of the workshop, individual aspects of the previous day's presentations on language deprivation will be reflected upon using examples from the clinical work of workshop participants who work in psychotherapy with deaf clients. In light of previous research on language deprivation, we will also reflect on the impact of individual symptoms of language deprivation on the patient-therapist relationship between deaf patients and deaf or hearing therapists. Participants working in the field of psychotherapy will be given sufficient opportunity to present their own experiences and ideas, with particular emphasis on the exchange of experiences in the various therapeutic approaches (VT, TP, psychoanalysis, systemic therapy, etc.).

Ultimately, the objective is to identify and summarize the workshop results by comparing them with evidence-based methods and practical and ineffective approaches for future treatment strategies adapted to language deprivation. This would enable treating professionals to be offered preliminary guidelines, which could also serve as a basis for justifying the cost of treatment, for example, in healthcare when requesting extensions to treatment plans. Furthermore, the guidelines could inform the development of new adapted treatment methods.

The workshop is aimed at psychologists and physicians working in psychotherapy and psychotherapists in training.

Despite the high prevalence and the increasing importance of language deprivation in the psychotherapeutic care of deaf people, there is a lack of diagnostic and therapeutic tools. This is because the language deprivation syndrome is poorly understood, and treatment approaches are underdeveloped. In the past, this has led to misdiagnoses, such as the classification of children with language impairment as mentally retarded, or suboptimal or inadequate therapeutic interventions, such as the prescription of medications for secondary or comorbid conditions (depression, anxiety, personality disorders, etc.) that only alleviate symptoms but do not lead to improvement. 

The workshop is aimed at researchers and therapists with and without relevant experience who want to learn which aspects of the behavior of deaf people indicate language deprivation syndrome. The participants will become familiar with diagnostic and differential diagnostic instruments and try them out, develop a sensitivity for recognizing linguistic deficits and behavioral patterns in deaf people, expose existing prejudices and misdiagnoses, and gain more confidence in their own diagnostic and psychotherapeutic work. In addition, the concept of LDS, which has been perceived as pathological to date, is to be reflected upon and critically questioned against the background of a socially induced mental disability. The introduction of compulsory sign language learning for children born deaf is to be discussed.