debate

Stammering in times of Corona

‘Stammering does not exist in a vacuum’ I remember being drawn to this line when editing Christopher Constantino’s chapter of Stammering Pride and Prejudice. It’s the type of sentence I tend to like: it’s short, simple but it also makes you think. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. I’m not sure about you, … read more…

Stammering and autism

Intersectionality is an interesting concept. When you think about it, you think of two, unrelated things intersecting in unexpected ways. When people think of intersectionality, you think of the black male saying he knows everything about racism and the white female saying she knows everything about sexism, while the African American woman is standing there … read more…

Intersectionality of gender and stuttering

Intersectionality means a lot of things to me. It allows me to see the complexity of myself, recognizing that my experiences do not occur within a vacuum of one identity. I can recognize that the things that I experience in society, the feelings and thoughts that I have, and ways that I interact with the … read more…

Intersectionality: What intersectionality means and why it’s important for stuttering

People who stutter all share common experiences. At some point, all of us who stutter have felt the knot in our stomachs when someone says introduce yourself to the group, or we feel our hearts race at the thought of using the telephone. When we were in school and had to read out loud, we … read more…

Speech and language therapy and the social model: Out at sea and lost?

In the new book, ‘Stammering Pride and Prejudice: Difference not Defect’ (Campbell et al., 2019) Chris Constantino writes about the need for new narratives in stammering. He holds up the social model as a tool to help people think outside of the box, yet poignantly adds that the real challenge is that people who stutter … read more…

We need to talk about therapy for children who stammer: a new approach

In the previous blog post, ‘We need to talk about therapy for children who stammer’ (March, 2019) we argued against traditional, medical model practices which perceive stammering as un-natural or disordered, and focus on eradicating or diminishing stammering. We argued for a new, consistent approach to support children who stammer in their early years; one … read more…

Re-imagining adult stammering therapy

Last year, I went to a talk by Max Gattie on the therapies available to adults who stammer. Max listed the core approaches most people opt for: City Lit, NHS therapy, McGuire and Starfish. I realised, whilst looking at the whiteboard he wrote them on, that they are all informed to some extent by the … read more…

In the Face of Jargon

In Patrick Campbell’s previous blog, he talks about the “common language we hear in and around speech and language therapy” and the “language of childhood therapy.” As the parent of a now-23-year-old who stutters, I never questioned what a therapist meant when they talked of “speech therapy.” This is a topic now on my mind … read more…

We need to talk about therapy for children who stammer

cut out kids

Childhood stammering therapy has come under less scrutiny than adult stammering therapy from a social model perspective. In this blog, we want to look at how criticisms of the medical model, and the rise of the social model and neurodiversity, may challenge some clinical practices for childhood stammering therapy.

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A Potted Glossary of Speech and Language Therapy

silhouettes

I believe one of the advantages of stammering is the intimate relationship with language it brings. Stammerers think, feel and speak language in a way that is at once broken but at the same time filled with opportunities. Blocking, repeating and word-swapping can all be seen as failures of communication, but they also open up avenues of speech that would in a fluent person go unexplored. Indeed, the multitude of authors who stammer – David Mitchell, John Updike, Lewis Carroll – evidence the unique apprenticeship in language offered by stammering.

It is with this in mind, the importance of words to people who stammer, that I want to begin to reflect on some of the common language we hear in and around speech and language therapy.

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