I'm youngish (mid 30's) and recently had my hearing aids replaced and realized I had a strong preference to stick with fairly visible behind-the-ear units rather than something more "discrete". I want them to be visible so that people I'm interacting with will be more sympathetic about repeating themselves and may make an (possibly unconscious) effort to speak more clearly.

The line of thinking that got me over being self conscious was "Lot's of people walk around with assistive devices for their vision...why should I be embarrassed about the same thing for my hearing?"

It's probably worth distinguishing between two kinds of phenomena that might be described as carrying a stigma:

- Something might lead other people to mock or otherwise denigrate you for exhibiting it. Being fat is a good example here; fat people get a lot of messaging from society that they're worse people for being fat.

- Something might carry no real significance to the rest of society while still being viewed, by the individual, as painfully embarrassing. There's a traditional view that women don't like to wear glasses because they think the glasses ruin their looks. I don't know how well that currently corresponds to reality; I've known one girl who really hated her glasses for that reason and another who, not needing glasses of her own, liked to take other people's and wear them -- but that's the prototype of a "category two" stigma: a woman who hates wearing her glasses even though no one around her sees anything wrong with them.

I suspect that hearing aids are firmly within the second category, which means getting people to wear them "openly" should be doable.