Studying mental health at Queen Mary, and listening to Deaf adults in Bangladesh

My name is S N Sadiqul Haque, but I prefer the shorter version, Sadiq (both professionally and during my study in London. It’s easier, as it is the same name as London’s Mayor!). I am from Bangladesh, and I studied MSc Psychology: Mental Health Sciences at Queen Mary University of London in 2024–25 as a Chevening Scholar. 

My dissertation was called “Listening to the Unheard: Mental Health in the Bangladeshi Deaf Community”. From that dissertation, along with the help of my supervisors and my collaborators, I worked on publishing papers. One of the papers already got accepted in one of the reputed journals. It is titled “They Don’t Understand Me, and I Don’t Understand Them”, which is how one participant described life inside his own family. The weight of that interview, that emotion of that Deaf individual, touched me and my whole team. 

Nearly one in ten people in Bangladesh live with some form of hearing loss. It is the second most common disability in the country. Even so, when I searched the literature, only one recently published study had explored the mental health of Deaf people in Bangladesh in any depth. A regional report in 2015 counted 30 accredited sign language interpreters for the whole country. So a Deaf person who is struggling has almost no way to tell anyone. 

I came to this topic through my external collaborator, Dr M Tasdik Hasan of Monash University. He opened my eyes to a community I had never really thought about, even after years of working in public health. Team Inclusion Bangladesh Foundation, a disability rights organisation in Dhaka, then introduced me to the community and to professional interpreters. 

I interviewed seven Deaf adults, one to one, in Bangla Sign Language, with interpreters, online. I coded everything in Bangla rather than translating into English first, because so much of the meaning sits in how something is said.

Four themes came out of the analysis: 

• Communication barriers, everywhere. At home, at school, at work and in the clinic. One participant told me he cannot talk with his own family, because nobody at home signs. 
• Emotional isolation and neglect inside the family. Several had grown up hearing “you won’t understand”, and slowly stopped asking. 
• Real distress. Several described long stretches of depression and hopelessness, and some even spoke about suicidal thoughts. 
• Resilience and peer support. The Deaf community is trying to hold itself together. Friends counsel each other, help each other with job applications, and pass on whatever mental health knowledge they can find. 

The insight I keep coming back to is that most of the suffering my participants described did not come from being Deaf. It came from growing up in families, schools and hospitals that were never built with them in mind. 

Although I also interviewed sign language interpreters and health professionals who worked with Deaf individuals, and found their perspectives as well, I should be clear about the limits. Seven people cannot speak for every Deaf person in Bangladesh, and ours were mostly younger and living in cities. We also made no clinical diagnoses. These are people’s own accounts of their lives, not measured rates of depression. And our team was a hearing team. The next step has to be bigger studies with Deaf researchers or collaborators involved from the start, in the design and the analysis, not only as participants.

To be honest, it still feels a little unreal that my research is going to be published. It started as a dissertation I was nervous about, and now it is a paper with my name first on it. From one dissertation paper, we planned 3 papers. One already got accepted and is in the publication process, so it should come out any day now, and two more papers are in the manuscript writing process.  

The strongest feeling was not pride though, it was responsibility. Seven people sat in front of a camera and told a stranger some of the most painful parts of their lives, through an interpreter, with nothing in it for them. Their words are now on record, in a journal, where researchers and policy people can find them. That is what I wanted for them. 

And I am grateful to Cristina, to Tasdik, and to the whole team, who kept pushing the work to a standard I could not have reached on my own. Without these two people, I cannot imagine being at this stage, or even anywhere close! 

I knew Dr Cristina Cioffi’s work before I came to the UK. To apply for the Chevening Scholarship, I read about a few people and their work. She was the first person from Queen Mary. From knowing her almost five thousand miles away, without any planning on my part, she turned out to be my programme director, my teacher in several modules, and finally my dissertation supervisor (which I personally tried for and wanted!). 

Simply thanking her does not really cover it. From day one she guided and encouraged me, and she lifted my confidence at the times I doubted myself. I arrived with a topic that was ambitious for a one-year MSc. Interpreter-mediated interviews, a community I do not belong to, and detailed ethics approvals in two countries, yes! things were challenging. Yet she never made me feel that I could not do that job. She was always there for me. She never told me to make it smaller, or change the whole thing. She helped me make it rigorous, and she was honest with me when something was not good enough yet. 

She also did not stop at the dissertation. Both she and Dr Tasdik were the two amazing people who saw that it could become a paper (or even 3!), and she stayed with it through every round of edits and even now for the publication formalities! Many students have a good supervisor. I had one who treated the work as something that mattered beyond a grade. I was, am, and always will be grateful to her. 

Studying in the UK was different from anything I had done before, a different life experience altogether! At home I was used to being taught and then examined. At Queen Mary, the expectation was that you understand, and try to walk the talk, be vocal, even when you disagree, as long as you have backup evidence. It took me a few weeks to get comfortable with that, and it changed the way I look at evidence. 

The other part was the people. My class had students from all over the world, and East London itself is a wonderfully mixed place. The Mile End campus runs along the canal, and some of my best thinking happened walking there between the library and class. Sometimes the quiet afternoon sitting beside the canal, helped me to think without any rush of life. 

It was not all smooth. London is expensive, the winter is long and dark for someone from Dhaka, and I missed my family. Going to classes and running a full research project, with ethics approvals, interviews and analysis, in one year while adjusting to a new country, is genuinely tiring. Even so, I would do it all again without thinking twice! 

Some advice that I would you give to prospective international students considering the programme would be to apply for the funding. If you are from a country like mine, Chevening or a similar scholarship can turn an impossible plan into a real one. The application itself forces you to get clear about what you actually want. 

Start thinking about your dissertation from the first term. One year moves very fast, especially if your project needs ethics approval or data collection in another country. Mine needed clearance in both the UK and Bangladesh, and that takes time you will not have budgeted for. 

Choose a question you genuinely care about. There will be a week when you are behind, tired and far from home, and caring about the topic is what carries you through it. The passion should be there, to want to create some sort of impact, from the words to the field.  

And ask for help. Many of us who come from abroad stay quiet because we do not want to look like we are struggling. My supervisor, my academic adviser, the library staff, the wellbeing team, every single time I asked, someone helped. Nobody thought less of me for asking. There are genuinely helpful people, you just have to reach out. They will extend their hands for sure. 

- Sadiq 
MSc Psychology: Mental Health Sciences, 2024–25 | Chevening Scholar | Dhaka, Bangladesh 

The Paper: 

“They Don’t Understand Me, and I Don’t Understand Them”: Qualitative Exploration of Deaf Adults’ Lived Mental Health Experiences in Bangladesh.
S N Sadiqul Haque, Md Khalid Hossain, Manika Saha, Jessica Watterson, MD Jahirul Islam, Delvin Varghese, Roisin McNaney, M Tasdik Hasan, Maria Cristina Cioffi.