Monday, August 20, 2012

Web-based Cognitive-Behavioural Treatment: an innovative approach

I am not any more on the mailing list of that gold-standard Australia stuttering group except for threatening letters from lawyers. But I have my agents everywhere. So thank you, Agent I!

Here is an initiative that is probably reasonable: a web-based Cognitive-Behavioural Treatment. The idea is that a lot of the suffering and handicap comes not from stuttering but from our psychosocial adaptation to stuttering. CBT is a well-known psychotherapy approach that helps patients to achieve a better psychosocial adaptation by changing unhelpful thoughts or reducing conditioned fears, for example.

You can register from anywhere in the world. So might be an interesting experience with little downside and probably little relapse.

Reading about how they analyse their outcome and then sell it is probably not, but that is my problem not yours! ;-)

Here is their invitation.
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Paul's stuttering course

I highly recommend to you Paul Brocklehurst's course: see link here. In a sense it's a revolutionary approach, because he does not focus on treatment, but he only wants to inform people who stutter about their condition. I strongly believe that you can only manage your stuttering well by looking at yourself from a different perspective where you understand where stuttering comes from, what it did to you, how it affects you, and what treatments people have tried.

What I like about it is that no pressure for more fluency is applied. You are not expected to be more fluent, but you just go there to learn more and ask as many questions as you want. Impossible to feel like a loser afterwards as there is no relapse of understanding and knowledge!

And as Paul says, this will prepare you well for a real treatment.Well done, Paul!

Here is a quick summary of what he intends to do:
These classes are designed to provide people who stammer with a clear and detailed insight into their condition, including what factors influence its severity and what practical steps they can take to better control and manage it. The course will be interactive, with plenty of opportunity for questions and answers and to try things out. It will provide an ideal foundation for individuals wishing to enrol on one of the intensive therapy courses. Each meeting is divided into two halves. In the first half we give a presentation, introducing the topic to be discussed. Then, after a short coffee break, the second half will be practical and interactive, giving participants an opportunity to share their experiences and to contribute to the class.

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Fill in student's questionnaire

Please help a "poor" student, Beth Harris from De Montfort University at Leicester (England), to collect data for her thesis work. Your participation won't change the way we look at stuttering, but will provide her with good data to learn how to do statistical analysis in the real world.

Go to this link.

Sunday, August 05, 2012

A blog on taking meds for stuttering


A PhD student, M.,  has created a new blog:
I've created a blog where I will post information on the experiences people have with various medications they're trying for stuttering. This way we can get as many people as possible to post their experiences so that we have a nice little anecdotal data source for stutterers interested in meds. 
It is a good initiative, but based on experience I know that quite a few have written to me about their successes but then when I re-contacted them months later, they stopped taking them! In fact, I do not know a single person that contacted me that still takes them! NO-ONE!

He wants to stay anonymous. So here is my message to him:

Of course, I will do that. But if you ask me to remove your name from this post, then I think that psychotherapy (and self-help group) might actually be a better choice of treatment for you. You are running away from your handicap. All that effort spent on hiding and taking pills with uncertain outcome...