I used to fantasise about complete deafness, much moreso last year than any other time in my life. It was a warped form of thinking that didn't really arise until I was in severe depression and was looking to blame anything on everything.
At the time, my logic was that the closer you are to being like an average person who can hear, the more likely people think you are mentally slow instead of having a hearing loss. However it didn't occur to me, at the time, that people treated me as such because of the way I act.
People understand deafness and the barrier it posses, however what people don't understand is the "gap," because they hear a person talking, think they are normal until a deaf person run into trouble with hearing certain sounds. By large, most people, are used to that absence in elderly people, but not with young or middle-aged people. So, they would infer that the person they are talking to is slow. However if you tell them that you are deaf, use sign language or write, then there is a different set of behaviour. Some of the "oh, you're deaf" behaviour is quite rude, but it is far better than getting the "what's wrong with you" stare and then having people act out.
In my case, most people don't understand that I miss out on the upper part of the speech banana (f/ph, s, sh, ch and so on) and that I don't have very good sense of directional hearing. On top of that, I am overly sensitive to sound and vibrations, so people think it's weird that I respond to some more readily than most and and completely be oblivious to other sounds.
However if I use sign language, then people treat me "normally." If I don't, then people do treat me "normally" up until I run into a barrier, then people look at the person beside me for answers. Of course, this is providing that my sight loss is not obvious here, which is an entirely different set of prejudices, and not are misunderstandings, in itself.
So yeah, I used to fantasise about self-inflicted deafness just to erode the misunderstandings I had as someone who have a little bit of hearing left; I am considered having a severe to profound hearing loss before, and after, having that mindset. I probably will have to get another audiogram to see if my hearing is still degenerating.
It's like when I see other teens with their ipods up so loud you can hear it in China and I want to beat the crap out of them for ruining their perfectly good hearing. 
