Hello everyone, I’m a long time lurker (first time posting) and I’d like to start off by saying how helpful I have found this subreddit! A couple years ago my husband went from fully sighted to zero vision. His vision is black. First it was just blurry and he thought he was just starting to need glasses. We live in the US and have no health insurance and we didn’t know what to do. Then his vision went black. Since then we discovered the department of blind services, were able to get medical attention, and he has had eye surgery but it does not look like his vision will be returning. This subreddit has been so incredibly useful to us for adjusting, finding helpful tools and technology, etc and I thank you for that.

With that said, I am in desperate need of advice. My husband is extremely depressed. I believe he is going through the stages of grief over his loss of vision (understandable) and was in denial for a long time hoping it would come back. Now I think he is stuck on depression and anger stages. The level of depression he it’s experiencing is worrying.

With his permission, I contacted the department of blind services to ask if they had any therapy referrals for helping him deal with processing his loss of sight. This isn’t a simply get over it thing, he very clearly needs professional help. We left numerous voicemails to his case manager over the course of weeks and got no response. I finally sent an email and the case manager emailed back that she was busy with open cases and his was closed due to failure to cooperate. I am extremely confused. He completed 5 classes with the department of blind services. I don’t remember all of the classes besides a life skills one (such as cooking) and group therapy (which he hates because most of the people in the therapy group had sight and it probably did him more harm than good but he completed it). The only class he did not complete was a typing class they put him in after these 5 classes. At the time he started this typing class, he was in and out of the hospital for other chronic health conditions; he developed gastroparesis and was/is in crippling (I do not use this word lightly) half the time; and we were on the verge of homelessness (it took a year for his disability application to be approved). Additionally, the typing class (like all his completed classes) was done virtually which he found very challenging - at the time he begged for a phone class to be able to better use his phone and they said they only did the phone class after the typing class. He ended up dropping the typing class and focusing on trying to get his gastroparesis under control (which is still a struggle to this day).

The department of blind services is mad he didn’t complete the typing course because he was supposed to be on a “go back to work” track. I think it’s unrealistic to expect someone who completely lost their vision, is in agonizing physical pain and in and out of the hospital, and was on the verge of homelessness to just pick up typing and start a completely new line of work (he was very athletic and worked with his hands prior) ASAP. I do not understand how because he didn’t complete a typing class, at one of the worst times in both of our lives, the department of blind services will no longer help him at all ever. Do you feel it would benefit us to try to reach out to someone else at the department of blind services? Does anyone have recommendations on therapy services for adjusting to being blind? He is on disability and Medicaid. If anyone has any advice at all on where to go from here it would be greatly appreciated.