Psychological Counselling Service to Adjust to Sight Loss

Thanks to the extraordinary advances in modern ophthalmology, severe sight loss is fortunately an uncommon process. However, when it does occur, the person affected must modify the way in which they resolve the most basic challenges of everyday living, how they perceive the environment in which they live, how they move about and how they relate with other people. They must also change their perception of themselves. 

Emotional response after loss of vision can evolve into one of these three basic forms of adjustment:

• People who do not show strong negative feelings, either at onset or at the one-year check-up
• People who go from high to low moods
• People who continue to feel extremely low a long time after improvement is expected

Although not everyone with vision loss inevitably goes through the stages of depression or mourning, everyone experiences a certain degree of suffering and may initially find themselves in situations of emotional turmoil.

It is important to stress that suffering is not something pathological. It is a normal phenomenon that appears when you are threatened with the loss of integrity and as a result of considering that you do not have the necessary resources (or the resources you have are no longer valid) to overcome threats.

ICO works with Hedra Visión to support these patients. Hedra Visión is a Clinical Psychology institution specialising in this type of patients.

Hedra Visión intervenes to help people with visual problems play an active and positive role in learning and rehabilitation programmes and to stimulate the patient's involvement in his/her own process of adjustment to visual impairment.