Last Update: 01 Feb 2003

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Stuttering: The problem *

Personal stories about the devastation that stuttering wreaks on the lives of people who stutter are, unfortunately, all too common. The social penalties that people who stutter experience as a result of their stuttering, are often life-altering.

Stuttering: Handicap or not?

• Stuttering is a disorder which often hinders a person in many aspects of his/her life.
  
• People who stutter are often discriminated against.
  
• They often cannot go into normal social interactions.
  
• From time immemorial - they have often been misjudged as fools, psychopaths and figures of ridicule in our society. Literature, film, newspaper and television repeatedly take up and even intensify these wrong, one-sided and distorted pictures (Benecken, 1996).
  
• Jokes about stuttering are rife.
  
• Parents, teachers and employers often do not know how to react to or deal with stuttering.
  
• School is often an extremely negative experience for children who stutter and can often be
  the worst time of their life.
  
• People who stutter sometimes attempt, or even commit suicide.

* From Thomas Krall Keynote speech given in the 3rd IFA
congress in Nighborg, Denmark, August 2000

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Our experience with both self-help and therapy is that stuttering can be effectively managed and treated. However, stuttering management is a long term challenge and requires hard work, time and commitment.
There are so many badly qualified therapists, and many charlatans pepper the therapy scene. We need more competent, well-qualified stuttering specialists and more public education about current therapy approaches, especially relating to early childhood.
The following thesis is under discussion in many self-help groups:

To control stuttering and to maintain fluency is often a similar life experience as to learn a musical instrument, sports or a second language, and involves an entire lifetime of maintaining these techniques.

The best method of stuttering therapy remains a controversial issue. Prof. Fiedler, Germany, said in 1993:

"Every method helps".

This is a provocative but very interesting statement. "Every method helps" is just as true as: Every school teacher can teach, every tennis trainer and every piano teacher can give lessons. This thesis provokes many questions, for example:

• What is the best method for me?
  
• Who is a very good teacher for me?
  
• When I should take lessons? At the age of 3, 15, or 55?
  
• How can I identify a serious method and a serious trainer?
  
• What is my goal related to recovery from stuttering? Am I content with a little progress on the scale from 1 to 10 or do I want perfect fluency?
  
• How strong is my will, my staying power to practice the selected method possibly for years, or indeed my whole life?
  
• Who can best help me deal with my negative thoughts and feelings and help me become a more confident speaker?
  
• Who can help me in finding my personal way as best as possible?
  

It is good to know that we have relatively good answers for most of those questions, today. One thing is certain: From the perspective of people who stutter, it is important to have access to information which allows for good decisions. It is very helpful to contact the local self-help groups and the national associations for people who stutter, or to look at the homepages of those groups, or at the Stuttering Home Page.

* From Thomas Krall Keynote speech given in the 3rd IFA
congress in Nighborg, Denmark, August 2000

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The theme of stuttering as a handicap raises the very unpleasant topic of the fate of those people who stuttered during the time of the holocaust. The theme of the holocaust is once again in the media. How far did the nazis take their prejudice? The Nazi regime in Germany killed Jews, other ethnic groups and perceived public enemies during Second World War. They also either killed people who were physically and mentally handicapped or mentally ill, or abused them for experimental medicine. Both adults and children. We want to know the truth, before there are no more survivors from that time, and to tell the truth.
We feel compelled to ask whether any survivor knows what the fate was of those adults and children who stuttered? Should we look after this question more intensively and what should we do when we have the information?

* From Thomas Krall Keynote speech given in the 3rd IFA
congress in Nighborg, Denmark, August 2000