"The case of the Beau-Vallon": mental illnesses of deaf people to the psychiatric hospital.

OBJECTIVE This article aims to examine data on Psychiatric diagnoses among deaf people in comparison with hearing people in the psychiatric hospital in Beau-Vallon. METHOD This work proposes to study the diagnostic data from the Summary Psychiatric Minimum (Résumé psychiatrique minimum: RPM) from the years 2000 until 2009 from the psychiatric hospital Beau Vallon and for which a hearing problem has been highlighted on Axis III. The sample data of the deaf population will be compared with the sample of the total population represented by all patients for the year 2008. Both samples were found to be equivalent after a Mann-Whitney test to study the relationship between two independent samples with quantitative data. RESULTS The results show an overrepresentation of the diagnosis of psychotic disorders (40.7% against 29.3%), an equivalence of depressive disorders (18.5% against 18%) but bipolar disorders were absent in the deaf while they were found in 5.7% of patients with normal hearing, an overrepresentation in the deaf population of anxiety disorders (11.1% against 3.4%), intellectual disabilities (37% against 13.4% in the hearing population) and an under-representation of personality disorders (25.9% against 61.2% in the hearing population) CONCLUSION In this example, several concepts can be put forward to demonstrate bias and prejudice in the specific diagnostic support for deaf people with psychiatric teams who are not specialized in the treatment of deafness.