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From: Lisa LaSalle
Date: 14 Oct 2012
Time: 14:42:40 -0500
Remote Name: 96.251.126.134
hi Andrew, Your question is a good one, as Lynn says. It reminds me of something that happened to me a number of years ago. I had a former graduate student in Wisconsin graduate and go on to work in the school systems, I believe it was in Milwaukee. She emailed me about a year later, that she had a case of a girl about your age, 11 whom she determined was a "malingerer." She began by letting me know that this girl was the best friend of another girl who actually stutters, who she was seeing 2x per week for speech therapy in that school. So "malingering" is a fancy word for someone who is faking the problem. But it wasn't such a serious offense as it sounds, as the girl simply wanted to go to speech therapy just like her friend who stuttered. This speech therapist in Milwaukee learned that the girl was malingering because she stuttered on every word of the Pledge of Allegiance, upon testing her. And that is quite unusual for people who stutter to stutter on every word and to stutter on something that's pretty well memorized especially when they were practicing it in chorus. She simply told the girl that there's a lot of fun things that happen in speech therapy and she could instead be a "speech buddy" to her friend who stutters. She said something like, "you don't have to make yourself stutter in order to come to visit my speech room." I have since liked telling this story in my graduate classes because it's the only case of malingering I have ever come across. I also teased the speech therapist, or SLP, for having such a cool speech room, that she may need to watch for more cases of malingering.