Need To Help Children With Deafblindness In Emotional Development

. The remaining 90% are not merely underserved. They are, in a meaningful sense, invisible.But invisibility is not the same as absence. These children feel deeply. They experience anxiety, frustration, grief, and loneliness, yet are often unable to express these emotions in ways that schools, clinics, and rehabilitation centres are equipped to recognise. Where another child might cry or verbalise distress, a child with deafblindness communicates the same pain through behaviour: Repetitive movement, aggression, silence. And what does our system do with that behaviour? It manages it. It corrects it. It rarely asks what lies beneath. A child repeatedly hitting their head or withdrawing completely may not be ‘misbehaving’; they may be expressing fear, sensory overload, or emotional distress.This is the invisible grief at the heart of deafblind childhood: Not just the disability itself, but the emotional neglect that compounds it. The rehabilitation system focuses on communication and mobility, leaving psychosocial well-being largely unaddressed. The causes are structural as much as attitudinal. Clinical instruments used in mental health settings assume verbal communication, functional vision, or the ability to respond to direct questioning, none of which a child with deafblindness may possess. The distress such tools cannot capture goes unrecorded, unfunded, and unaddressed. Sense International India is the country's only national-level organisation dedicated to people with deafblindness, working across 25 states and reaching over 84,000+ individuals since 1997. Behaviour is often the only language these children have. When it is treated as a problem to be corrected rather than a message to be understood, those children are, in effect, silenced a second time. The consequences extend beyond the child. Caregivers burn out. Siblings are overlooked. Mothers shoulder the weight of intervention with little institutional support and almost no acknowledgment of their own psychological needs. Emotional development is not a luxury that comes after the basics; it is the foundation on which all other development rests. A child in chronic distress cannot build the trust-based relationships that are the precondition for every other form of progress.Yet this gap is neither invisible nor impossible to address. Sense International India has taken steps to respond to this urgent need. It has developed the SII-SAMWED, India's first structured mental health screening tool for children and young adults with deafblindness, validated across 308 children and 117 young adults, assessing five domains: emotional regulation, behavioural regulation, social functioning, cognitive and physiological regulation, and, for young adults, substance use. Separately, a psycho-social first aid programme, developed with the Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar, has trained over 1,500+ stakeholders. Currently, 280 persons with deafblindness and 167family members are receiving counselling and psychosocial care as a direct result.These are significant steps, and they are, at present, exceptions rather than norms. Most special educators receive no training in psychosocial support. Most district-level disability programmes do not include mental health screening. Most families navigate this journey without access to a psychologist, a counsellor, or even a basic framework for understanding what their child might be experiencing emotionally.The cost of this inattention is not abstract. Children who grow up without emotional recognition become adults who struggle with self-regulation and social participation in ways that could have been addressed far earlier. Every year without structured emotional support is a year of compounded isolation.The question worth sitting with is whose mental health we are actually prioritising. Too often, awareness and attention flow toward those who can articulate distress in forms legible to clinical systems. Children with deafblindness may not communicate distress in ways conventional systems recognise, but that does not mean they have nothing to say. It means we have not yet built systems capable of listening. What is required is not complicated: psychosocial training as a mandatory component of special educator certification, mental health screening integrated into district disability protocols, and dedicated support for caregivers. The tools, including SII-SAMWED and the PSFA programme, already exist and are validated. The systems to support these children can be built. The question is whether we are willing to build them.(The views expressed are personal)This article is authored by Sampada Shevde, director, education and research, Sense International India.