GLOBAL AND UKRAINIAN EXPERIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSISTANCE FOR ADULTS WITH HEARING IMPAIRMENTS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Providing high-quality psychological assistance to adults with hearing impairments will have a significant impact on improving the quality of life of these persons, their subjective well-being, will increase their self-esteem and self-esteem, optimal functioning, significantly reducing anxiety and harmonizing the ‘I-concept’. The purpose of this article is to analyze the Ukrainian and foreign experience of providing psychological assistance to adults with hearing loss and to carry out comparative analysis, as well as to develop our consulting practice for people with hearing impairments who wear hearing aids or cochlear implants and use mainly oral speech in everyday life, applying the Adlerian direction in psychotherapy. A systematic review of scientific sources allowed us to identify the main strategies and directions of providing psychological assistance to adults with hearing impairments. A significant number of techniques, not necessarily Adlerian, are suitable for working with hearing-impaired clients, which need to be adapted both to the needs of the hearingimpaired as a whole, and to the degree of hearing loss, time of loss, education level, and age of each client. The use of a wide range of auxiliary techniques, such as: art therapy, dance therapy, clay therapy, phototherapy, is appropriate in working with this category of persons. The scientific novelty of this article is the study of modern counseling experience, its systematization, and the development of the author’s system of counseling adults with hearing impairments with developed oral speech. A comparative analysis of the practice of counseling adults with hearing deprivation, who no longer study in educational institutions in Ukraine, showed that this type of counseling is still at the initial stage of development and requires new developments by practical psychologists and a lively discussion and exchange of experiences on the pages of scientific publications. These questions became the subject of research of this article.