Auditory Hallucination in Post Lingual Deaf Person: a Case Report

Abstract

Evaluation of auditory hallucination in deaf person is a challenging task, and there is a paucity of standard procedure to evaluate. It was aimed at reporting a postlingual deaf patient with unique experience of auditory hallucination after a long period of not hearing any sound which made us difficult to evaluate. A 42-year-old profoundly deaf male presented with hearing voices and persistent communication with that voices; sudden unprovoked aggression; undue suspiciousness; sleep disturbances; poor self-care for last 1 month. As deafness is a strong communication barrier, the clinical diagnostic interview was performed carefully by written languages with the help of pen and paper to evaluate his hallucination as well as other psychotic symptoms. The detailed evaluation revealed that the patient had the third person auditory hallucination in the form of running commentary which fulfills all criteria of perception. He was a diagnosed case of schizophrenia and treated with antipsychotics. He responded with medications and discharged for further follow-up. A different standardized method to explore such phenomenon in the deaf persons may provide comfort to the clinicians as well as may reduce the suffering of the affected persons.