Our Lives: Season 6, Episode 1

6 - 1: Born Deaf, Raised Hearing

Jonny Cotsen is an actor and a father of two children, and he's deaf. Though he was born deaf, he was made to adapt to be part of the hearing world, and this hasn't always been easy. This is his story as he tries to understand the life-changing decisions his mother took when he was a child, and what it means to live in two different worlds.

As a child, he was given analogue hearing aids, learned to lip-read and was taught to speak, which has left him traumatised. He had no deaf role models and no deaf identity, and he didn't even learn sign language. Now he wants to understand why his mum made the life-changing decision to raise him as if he was hearing. What was she thinking at the time, and what were the experts telling her?