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. Vision professionals acknowledge that many cases of impairment lack medical solutions. We're trying to raise awareness, but we're just scratching the surface. The concept of vision rehabilitation was first developed in the late 1940s when World War II veterans with eye injuries needed help returning to the work force.