ABSTRACT
In 2010, Johannes Fellinger, a psychiatrist, researcher, and founder of the Institute of Neurology of Senses and Language in Linz, Austria, invited second author Robert Pollard to collaborate on a review article examining the current status of Deaf mental health (DMH) research. The article had been solicited by the editors of The Lancet, a highly influential British medical journal read by physicians worldwide. Review articles solicited by The Lancet typically require the authors to collect and examine only very high quality research studies published in the past handful of years, thereby focusing the authors’ opinions on only the best and most recent findings in a given field of study. I (Pollard) was told that The Lancet editors requested that the review article focus only on high quality empirical studies in the DMH field that were conducted in the past 5 years or so and, further, to limit the review to about 100 of these presumed recent, high quality empirical studies. This implausible directive conveyed The Lancet’s presumption that a given medical topic, particularly one as broad as “mental health of deaf people” (as the article was ultimately titled) would indeed have a rich body of high quality, recent empirical research activity that the authors could draw from in crafting their review.
