Monday, January 19, 2009

Spontaneous recovery?

Can people who stutter recover spontaneously? Here are a few anonymous reports from STUTT-LIST.  
I personally know two people who recovered/overcame stuttering. One man ... spent most of his life with a stuttering problem but then worked though it himself. He felt that he accepted that he stuttered and then got on with is life never avoiding and became a VP for sales. He had very little speech therapy.
I have a family member ... who stuttered severely-markedly through grade and high school and through college. He never had therapy but 'became fed up with stuttering' so he decided to overcome it. His first job was selling stock over the phone. His comment was that 'it just went away one day' apparently due to his determined attitude, self-challenging demeanour and eventual perceptual shift as he no longer identifies himself as a stutterer. He never had speech therapy.
I encountered someone who claims to have ended a stuttering problem immediately following a neck adjustment by a chiropractor when he was 12 years old. ... He was about 30 at the time. His responses to the few questions I asked him about the circumstance of his recovery and the nature of the problem he had experienced seemed credible and so did his slightly incredulous demeanour as he related the experiences.

What I have heard are two versions: The first of people who stuttered as kids and teenagers and then gradually they recovered without any conscious intervention on their part. The second of people who stuttered into (early) adulthood and then suddenly decided to change and actively worked on their behaviour, and stuttering gradually reduced. Regarding recovery as a teenage, I tend to believe in spontaneous recovery and then the people associated an event happening around the same time as a cause of recovery. Regarding recovery as adult, I believe in the right moment at the right time where everything came together: ability to focus, attitude change, motivation to work on new behaviour, entry into a fluent phase of life, and so on.

3 comments:

O said...

Have a look, if you've never heard of this case, at

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=496017

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of a very funny episode of "Seinfeld" called "The Opposite". In this episode, George (not me) decides to do the opposite of every instinct or urge he ever has. Here's a general idea:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IjXUgxR4Z10

What if we did the opposite of everything our stuttering instincts tell us? Instead of emailing, we pick up the phone and call; instead of avoiding particular speaking situations, we actually volunteer to do them; instead of avoiding feared words, we say them as often as possible. Would that help us? I'm sure it would ... I know that a similar strategy helped Alan Badmington (he's quite prominent in stuttering community in Britain). Alan was a lifelong stutterer, but he now says that he no longer stutters; in fact, he doesn't even think about stuttering. Maybe this strategy won't completely eliminate everybody's stutter, but it can't help ...

George

Anonymous said...

Edgar Cayce, the most documented psychic, apparantly could tap into the oneness of all force...he said that the cause of stuttering had to do with the mislignemtn of certain vertebrae. The solution was to see a chiropractor...