“Stuttering is one of those disorders that when you say that you are a speech pathologist, people say, “oh yeah like you work with people who stutter?” Well I happen to be one of those people, yes. We are really talking about one percent of the population of persons who stutter. If you look at really tiny children under the age of five, you can look at anywhere from five to ten percent of the population-little children-who have some evidence of stuttering. And it is interesting to know that of those little ones, who appear to be stuttering, that by the time we get them to be six, seven, eight, nine, ten, really, we are looking at ten percent of the children who were indefinitely-persistent with stuttering. So, we do know that there is with most people, not everybody, but most people that are what we call are developmental stutterers. That means that since they started talking, they have demonstrated this repetition, prolongation, whatever it is, during their talking. There are some people that may have had some sort of brain injury-they might have had a traumatic brain injury [TBI], they could have had a stroke and that they will stutter during recovery. But they are very different people than people who are developmental stutterers. And that is like about, of the one percent population, I would say five percent were what we would call, neurological stutterers. And then there is even a smaller percentage, two percent maybe, of the one percent maybe even less than that, who are what we call psychogenic stutterers. This is where they have either experienced some sort of trauma, emotional or physical trauma, and that prior to the trauma they did not stutter. But they did after that. So, like the neurogenic stutters. The neurogenic stutters are when they have a frank evidence of brain injury. They did not stutter before, they had the brain injury and then they stuttered after. But these are different folks… the people who have psychogenic stutters. Their stuttering is different than folks who are developmental stuttering.
With adolescents and adults who stutter, who are what we call persistent stutterers, there is a whole…the outside stuttering, the repetitions, the prolongations, whatever it is and then there is what I call the inside stuttering. The inside stuttering is the fear, the anxiety, the shame. They don’t know when it will happen. Can you imagine if you never knew that when you opened your mouth you did not know if you were going to stutter or not? It would be terrifying. So, with folks like that, the treatment technique is really working on ways to modify the initiation. And working on their own self-concept, and their understanding. Because many people who are adolescents and adults who stutter think that if they do not tell people that they stutter, that people will not know. But people realize it because you know they are like “hello we know when you are talking, you are doing this and people are going to know you are stuttering, so why not just tell them?” Like “Hi, my name is Robbie, and I Am a stutterer, so you just have to give me some time. I will finish what I say, but please do not finish my statements for me.” So, you see there are different ways of handling young children, adolescents and adults.”
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