A non-linear loss should not be an issue for any modern hearing aid, they are designed specifically to deal with that. I've never seen an audiogram with a complete flat (linear) loss, I'm sure some have it but its not common.

I have a severe sensorineural loss in both ears and wears hearing aids with a lot of success. My loss was the result of some unknown illness when I was younger - a loss resulting from illness or drug reaction tend to present randomly across the frequencies, whereas an age-related loss is almost always a "ski slope" loss, which means the high frequencies are mostly lost and the lowers are mostly fine.

Your experience is very common with new hearing aid users. The aids are able to increase volume at specific frequencies as defined by your hearing test(s) and the other features of the aid, e.g. noise reduction and compression are able to give a great quality of sound. The problem is usually in the person's ability to comprehend these new sounds, i.e. their brain, not their ears. A person with a hearing loss typically takes seven years to try out hearing aids, in those years their brain has got used to not hearing certain frequencies and sounds altogether and it can take time and training to get that ability back.

There is not really a great set of tools for brain training part of the hearing problem at the moment, in my opinion its badly overlooked by the hearing industry.

This is a very interesting book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0262045869

I've had two bouts of SSNL, both in the right ear. The first only took my high end frequencies, so a hearing aid did work, but the second just about flatlined my hearing in that ear, so the hearing aid only gives the results you're referencing. I have a date for surgery to implant a bone-conducting hearing aid next month, it should hopefully restore hearing from that side. Definitely talk to your ENT about that option, the processor mounts magnetically (no cochlear implant style port in your head), so you can get away from the feeling of a hearing aid plugging up your ear!

Thanks, I thought bone conducting still depended on the damaged hairs in ear for transferring to nerves though?

It does, but as long as you have a functioning inner ear on one side, the bone conduction will transmit sound to that side.

My understanding of hearing aids is not that it makes sounds louder across the entire spectrum, but only selective frequencies?

An audiologist should be able to tune your hearing aids to amplify only those frequencies that need amplification.

(Although my understanding is that this is fairly new, and may not be available around the world)

Yes hearing aids tuning is a thing, often must be done repeatedly because of discomfort.

But the serious problem with hearing loss is the "bandwidth", meaning the damaged cells send less information to the brain even if attenuation is compensated by hearing aid, leading to bad recognition of sounds and speech.

With most new hearing aids users, multiple tunings are required as they cannot handle the new volume and intensity of sounds that hey haven't heard for years.

An audiologist will typically test someone, see that they need amplications across the range but send them away with a much lower amplification for a weeks to get used to things. Then bring the volume up as time goes by.

People amy also need to get used to the aid's noise reduction algorithms as they can seem unatural at first and is a nightmare for anyone who used to wear an old analog hearing aid with no noise reduction.

So, yeah, hearing aids are rarely plug-and-play from day one - the user needs time to adjust.

My hearing loss got to a point where tuning the hearing aid to the point where it sufficiently amplified sound for me to distinguish speech made it so loud that it sounded to my brain like a normal speaking volume, but it caused physical pain in my ear.

Yes I have tuned hearing aids and unfortunately my SNHL still struggles with speech perception.