Speaker Abstracts

Abstract

The Deaf community consists of a diverse group of individuals with varied languages (i.e. American Sign Language, English, etc.), community affiliations (i.e. Deaf culture, general community, etc.), and sociocultural norms (Anderson et al., 2018). Despite evidence of higher rates of victimization, behavioral health disorders, and hazardous drinking among Deaf individuals, they remain one of the most understudied populations in behavioral health research (Anderson et al., 2018;Fellinger et al., 2012). Significant disparities exist in access to and utilization of behavioral health services among Deaf individuals due to limited access to health information, fear and mistrust in healthcare settings, cultural and linguistic oppression, fear of stigmatization within the Deaf community, communication barriers, and a lack of culturally appropriate services (Barnett et al., 2011;Fellinger et al., 2012). CBT for Treatment Seeking (CBT-TS) has shown promise as an intervention to promote the use of treatment services among hearing individuals (Stecker et al., 2012), but it is unknown whether the intervention would be effective with Deaf individuals and what modifications might be necessary to increase its accessibility and applicability. This paper will present an ongoing project funded by an NIAAA diversity supplement [R01AA026815-03S1] to adapt CBT-TS for Deaf individuals using the ADAPT-ITT model, a pragmatic framework for adapting evidence-based interventions (Wingood & DiClemente, 2008). The first part of this project involves elicitation interviews with members of the new target population regarding their attitudes and beliefs about treatment, facilitators and barriers to treatment seeking, and the impact of COVID-19 on treatment seeking. The second part involves soliciting feedback of the materials, content, and delivery of CBT-TS from the target population and key stakeholders in the community via a pretesting methodology called “theater testing.” Finally, data from the elicitation interviews and the theater testing sessions will be combined to produce an adapted version of CBT-TS for Deaf individuals. This paper will present background information about behavioral health disparities among Deaf individuals and the rationale, plan, progress, and initial data of the ongoing project. An adaptation of CBT-TS for Deaf individuals would benefit a historically underserved community with potentially higher rates of hazardous drinking and behavioral health disorders and lower rates of treatment use.