Saturday, May 28, 2011

Hitten loves us!

I like Hitten's Stuttering Hub. His posts are short, his comments are (mostly) wise and not just empty talk, and he doesn't make the mistake of launching into causal theories of stuttering but focusses on the reaction to (his) stuttering. I recommend his blog to anyone who wants to address the psychosocial aspects of stuttering: the fears, the sense of underachievement, frustration, self-esteem issues, and negative attitude. He also offers free counselling sessions.

If you want to know why Hitten loves us, read his post on attending a 10-day meditation course.

7 comments:

Rich said...

Apparently you didn't catch this part of his bio:

"He has a PhD in Biomedical Information Systems, and is a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)."

Seriously, NLP? Absolutely ridiculous pseudo-science, which is sad/ironic considering he has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Information Systems, and so necessarily understands the principles of empirical research. Unimpressive and disappointing.

Tom Weidig said...

I have never heard him say anything (wrong) about the causes of stuttering. He doesn't charge any money or gives promises, and he seems to only use NLP as a set of tools to help cope with stuttering. And many of these tools are just standard psychotherapy techniques dressed in admittedly fuzzy labels.

Satyendra said...

I think, Hiten's website, represents a ray of the good old wisdom: sharing good self-help ideas, very concisely and very informally.. Very useful.

Anonymous said...

I am surprised that guys like you and Rich even bother to read articles like this. I would have expected more of a "Crackpot Award" mentality from you Tom based on past assessments of this type of approach from you. Hitten writes about the sort of thing that all of us are some day going to come to understand is the real answer to what stuttering has to teach us. NLP and meditation are just on the surface of some esoteric and spiritual based modalities that are soon to be showen to be of more immediate and long term benefit to people with communication disorders than traditional speech therapy approaches that just define and treat the problem based purely on an assessment and observation of the physical symptoms as they manifest in various forms.

Ora said...

The little I've read about neurolinguistic programming seems unconvincing to me.

However, it's worth noting that Medline - the online database of the National Library of Medicine - has "neurolinguistic programming" as a standard search term - see here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=mesh&term=%22Neurolinguistic%20Programming%22

And when you do a search using that search term, it returns 88 articles in legitimate-sounding publications:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=%22neurolinguistic%20programming%22

Obviously this doesn't prove much about the validity of NLP, but it does indicate that it's apparently a topic of study by serious researchers.

Of course, it's possible that the references to NLP in these articles are simply to discredit it. Only the abstract of the article is available on Medline, and in most cases the term "neurolinguistic programming" appears only as a search term, not in the the abstract, so it would be necessary to review each article to see what it has to say about NLP.

Ora said...

Tom - Unless I've missed something, the last time you've written about NLP was some blog postings in 2006.

(I used this Google search: neurolinguistic programming site:thestutteringbrain.blogspot.com)

Would you care to express an opinion?

Tom Weidig said...

@Ora: As I said before, most techniques in NLP are nothing new, and are around in psychotherapy for a long time. They are just re-worded and sound cooler. I have in principle nothing against the methods themselves.

I attack the underlying philosophy of the approach. That you can re-program your brain, and that the program is the issue. Often, NLP people construct theories about stuttering and here is where they are definitely wrong.