"I work at a university in a department of communications: Sciences and Disorders. My job is to educate undergraduates and graduates who are wanting to become speech-language pathologists, and I am a speech-language pathologist. Currently my areas of clinical involvement and research are in the following: working with individuals who stutter, working with individuals who have a variety of different voice disorders (including transgender voice training), also working with individuals that have speech sound disorders (and that could be little children who are not developing their speech as would be expected for their age), as well as individuals that have some neurological disorder which makes it difficult for them to produce intelligible speech. Speech therapy is a treatment approach that really looks at changing behavior and so it is not something where we are necessarily giving medication or we are doing some sort of massage or something along those lines, but rather teaching some compensatory strategies in a fifty-minute session “x” number of times per month; per week. We are helping individuals learn how to manage a small bit of their motor behavior that becomes more personally relevant and making sure that they can demonstrate change in whatever it is that we are trying to help them with. So, obviously, we have to work with starting out with small bits of behavior and moving, moving, moving… And as with all kinds of therapy it is important that people do whatever practicing in whatever arena they need to do outside of the treatment session, because you cannot just expect that coming twice a week, for an hour each time, is going to be enough to change something that has been going on for fifteen years; twenty years; five years; ten years. So, it really does require commitment on the part of the person and or the part of the parent. "
