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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 01 Oct 2009
Time: 09:34:00 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.121
Dear Mario, This is a difficult question to answer. Stuttering involves behaviors, feelings, and thoughts, or as Gene Cooper used to say "the ABCs of stuttering" (Affect, Behavior, and Cognition). At its most basic level, the answer depends on what you want. Assuming you want to be more fluent, then it makes sense to find a speech-language pathologist (speech and language therapist) who has experience in helping people like you become more fluent. Most people would further assume that if you become more fluent, then the negative feelings and thoughts you may have will simply go away. That can happen, but our experience over the past 40 years or so suggests that most adults who stutter seem to hold onto many of their old fears (or they come back on their own) even after successful therapy in terms of becoming much more fluent. Therefore, I believe that dealing with the negative/counter-productive thoughts and feelings is an important part of any stuttering therapy for adults who have stuttered for many years. Should a psychologist carry this out? I cannot say for sure in your situation, but in the USA, my answer is generally "no." I say that because most psychologists have little if any training in stuttering and even a few of them still believe, erroneously, that stuttering is a symptom of an underlying psychopathology. A competent speech-language pathologist should be able to help you become more desensitized to your stuttering, that is, to be less affected by it regardless of whether or not you can decrease its occurrence. There are a number of papers in this conference that will offer good suggestions of how you can do much of that on your own. That is a beginning for an answer. I'm sure you'll get much more as you follow this conference the next three weeks. Good luck, Ken