[ Contents ]
From: Terry Dartnall
Date: 10/22/03
Time: 10:26:55 AM
Remote Name: 134.29.3.133
Hi Laura
Glad that you enjoyed the article.
You ask what therapy I have had. Lots of respondents have asked me this, so I guess I wasn’t very clear in the article.
The answer is, basically none. I went to see a psychiatrist because I was having what seemed to be panic attacks at night. He wasn’t much help. After I’d been seeing him for YEARS I plucked up the courage to say that I thought the main cause of my stress was my stammer. He refused to believe that I have a stammer. This stand-off lasted for months. Finally, reluctantly, he agreed to refer me to an SLP. She picked the stammer immediately. My psychiatrist phoned her (I was there at the time) and said, “This person thinks he has a stammer.” “He does have a stammer,” said my SLP. When I discussed this with my psychiatrist, he was amazed when I told him that the SLP had told him that I have a stammer. Sometimes I wonder which one of us should be on the couch.
I digress. I went to the SLP for a few months. It was a total waste of time. We did slow speech and gentle onsets and things like that, but she pretty much told me that it wasn’t going to work. And it didn’t!
Terry