Psychological Burden People with low vision are at increased risk of accidents. They are often dependent, and although otherwise healthy, may be institutionalized as a result. They often lose the ability to perform many activities of daily living on their own, such as reading, paying bills, cooking, dressing, and shopping. Older people are already at increased risk for depression, and vision loss adds to their psychological burden. If you extrapolate to a national scale, there could be hundreds of thousands of older vision-impaired patients with undiagnosed depression.
Public misconceptions can heighten the isolation for people with vision impairment.
Then one day, the patient might not say 'hello' to them on the street. Their low vision allows them to continue walking, but makes it difficult to see faces. People think they're crazy or faking. If you break a hip, everyone knows, but no one can see you lose your vision. The greatest oversight of all may be that effective responses to low-vision problems frequently go unrecognized or unused by patients and doctors alike, especially vision rehabilitation.