Molly rocks!

Molly shows great courage and determination to speak out. She definitely has taken the right decision, and she will feel more and more liberated from stuttering. She might still keep on stuttering but not be a slave of her stuttering.

How do all those who keep the obvious a secret feel about those public outings?

International Stuttering Awareness Day

Check out the on-line conference for the International Stuttering Awareness Day starting tomorrow! An interesting mix of articles from people who stutter sharing their experiences, therapists talking about treatments, and researchers sharing their research and theories. The good thing is that you the reader can leave questions for the author, that cannot really be ignored and a no-answer is obvious to all! And it's a great retro experience of what the web used to feel like 10 years ago... ;-)

The worse thing about the conference are all those (female) students who start their questions with "Thank you very much for the efforts you have put into your article. I am really fascinated by the topics XYZ...." If  we are lucky, they actually ask a real question after those few sentences! So here is my advice: Just ask your damn question, no-one is interested in whether you find something fascinated, don't think about the consequences of your questions, don't be blinded by authority, and make up your own mind!

P.S. I have hacked the website in 10 seconds and you can already access the conference here. ;-)

Stuttering: Inspiring Stories and Professional Wisdom

Check out Peter Reitzes' book which collects stories and wisdom from people who stutter and professionals. I asked him to send me a summary of what his book is about. Attentive readers will note the ambitious "Publication No. 1." on the title page. I didn't have time to read through the book, but it seems to be cast in the mindset of its editor: providing others the opportunity to talking about their experiences and throwing out ideas while avoiding more definite scientific or generalizing statements that I could take apart! ;-)

 Here is the summary:

The book is titled Stuttering: Inspiring Stories and Professional Wisdom.  

It contains 25 chapters written by people who stutter, leading professionals and the spouse of a person who stutters. All chapters were donated to StutterTalk to help raise money for the free podcast. The book is available in paperback at Amazon for $12.99 and as an ebook and download at Kindle, iTunes and Smashwords for $5.99. Barnes & Noble online will carry the book within a few weeks. I

In Berlin

I will be in Berlin from Wednesday to Saturday with Jelena, and have to attend a business meeting, too. So if someone is from Berlin, let me know and you can join us for drinks or dinner! I am already in contact with Blanka, who had the first (and only) German-speaking blog on stuttering: Stottern usw. I am actually very much surprised that no-one else has a German-speaking blog...

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.

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.

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.

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...

BREAKING NEWS: Lidcombe no better than Demands & Capacities

Last week, the International Fluency Association's conference was held in Tours, France. Check out the IFA 2012 website: here. I as many others boycotted, voluntarily or due to a lack of money, the conference organised by Elsevier, the publishing company that has the academic community against themselves for over-charging. Even the local organisers have expressed their concern to me.

Anyway, I have breaking news for you. As you might remember, I have been and am a strong critic of what I see as sloppy outcome trials done by the Lidcombe consortium testing their own therapy approach, and force-feeding that approach to the therapy community as the gold standard.

In previous posts, I talked about an interesting trial with far better methodology (especially on sample size and observation period.) They decided to split the kids into two groups: one doing Lidcombe, and the other group doing Demand & Capacity. The published pilot study of 30 kids showed no difference between the two approaches. After much difficulties (including some unacceptable actions by some people), they managed to get a full long-term 18 month trial started with at least 120 kids, much more than the Lidcombe studies ever did but with zero public exposure, except on this blog.

At her IFA talk last week, Marie-Christen Franken said that their preliminary analyses show no difference between treatment when they compare pre with 18 months follow-up randomisation in percentage of stuttered syllables. They found an effect of time and of severity. Final results are not expected for a few months, as the PhD student is on maternity leave...

Anyway, to conclude, the combined evidence (from the pilot study and the preliminary results) point to the fact that both approaches show no difference in outcome. The message to all therapists in the world  should be crystal clear: don't believe what the Lidcombe people preached that they are the gold standard and no other approach should be not used as not tested. Other approaches are not worse. This fits well to evidence from psychotherapy showing that no method is better (except for a few special cases) and what counts is the PATIENT-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP.

But if no-one is better, maybe nothing is ultimately effective. The trial cannot answer absolute outcome as they did not have a control group.

For my beloved speech therapists!

Tim Poe: Not stutterer but mental issues??

And the story continues... He is apologizing for his lies, but insists that he did not lie. Does he have a mental disorder making it difficult for him to distinguish between reality and lies? Or is he just putting on a show?? He didn't seem to stutter in the interview either.

Does Tim Poe fake his stutter?

EVERYONE is asking the question..

Tim Poe has told lies about his life as a soldier, and provided a fake picture. He never got the Purple Medal for war injuries. But he seems to have been involved with the Army in some respects. No doubt the full story will emerge very soon.

So let's study his stuttering. As I wrote, I have never heard of a similar story, i.e. a non-stroke brain injury with such clear symptoms and no other apparent deficits at first sight. However, as his injury story is wrong, this fits with my observation that this case would have been unique. But he could have gotten an injury from somewhere else, too.

The real question to me is a) whether he stutters or not, and b) did he exaggerate his stuttering. I have to say that at first sight he sounds rather authentic. He stutters at the right places. However, as I replayed his speech over and over again, I noticed that his non-stuttered speech is very very smooth and controlled. And his stuttering is rather short and does not propagate into tensed non-stuttered speech. So he does not seem to feel a lot of emotional stress during the stuttered syllables. But he did have secondary symptoms during the stuttered syllables. So I am wondering about whether a middle-of-the-road theory is possible. He is a stutterer, knows how it feels to stutters, but has exaggerated his stuttering. Maybe he stuttered as a child. Or he is just a very good actor. Or he really did stutter as severely, and just invented the rest of the story to feel better about himself. And by telling that lie in a small social circle, for example with his fiancée, he might have had to keep it up as he entered the contest and then it just got bigger.

I have no idea. Except that he can sing. And his confident and calm singing must be the result of many many years of practise. His story that his therapist told him to sing in the shower and then he discovered his voice is not adding up, in my view.

And did he also learn to play the guitar while singing in the shower?? ;-)

But who cares... he is famous... and we are not!

P.S. I just listened to an interview with his fiancée. She sounds genuine, but just knows him from after the "injury". Either he had another brain injury and mixes up stuff. Or he completely made up the story...

Even neurogenic stutterers can sing

Check out the performance of this ex-soldier who got brain damaged. He stutters but he can sing like all people who started stuttering at a young age. I do not actually know of a similar case in the literature. And it shows that speaking and singing is not the same neurological pathway. Would be interesting to see his brain scans? I am convinced his damage is in one of the loci that Catherine Theys showed us at the Antwerp.

Treating stuttering with pharmaceuticals might harm you

A reader's comment on Holger's suicide:

I think it was the medicine that made him commit suicide not the stuttering itself. i really feel sad about him. I also used some medicines to cope with my stuttering. It really helps i was almost %100 fluent but it had serious side affects, i started to have memory loss, sexual disorder, i was always tired and sleeping too much so i quit, when i quit i get into depression and at some point i did not care if iam dead or not. before this drug i was always baffled when i heard someone committed suicide it seemed impossible for me to do it but after what i go through with the medicine i understood how those people feel. So if you ever think about taking drugs consider it twice. it really messes up your brain chemistry and i assure you that thats much worse than stuttering.

And another who tried it:

My conclusion is, right now, it's not the solution, but may have some positive effect on some people. My stuttering has been greatly improved by getting over the fear of it and accepting it. I believe you have written about this before, and perhaps part of why you joined toastmasters and participated in other activities. When I took the job that I have now, I knew that I would be faced with speaking often and in front of large groups. I had a lot of fear about that. However, now...the fear does not have as much sting as it used to have. 

The European Fluency Specialization

For speech and language therapists who want to specialize in stuttering:

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS COURSE 2012-2013 (download here) 

The ECSF consortium would like to announce that the registration for the 2012-2013 course cycle is open. The ‘ECSF’ is a one-year program, providing both the knowledge and the clinical skills, to assist speech-language therapists in becoming European Fluency Specialists. The program is a well-designed combination of lectures, clinical practice and home assignments. If you are already working as an SLT, this specialization course is compatible with your current workload. Lectures are provided during two intensive weeks, scheduled during the academic year. These modules are combined with follow up sessions in the home country of the participant. The local sessions take place outside the intensive weeks. Preparatory reading and home assignments form an integral part of the course. The specialized clinical training, under supervision of a fluency specialist, can begin after the first intensive week.

Visual Outing...

An interview with me appeared in the biggest weekly t'Revue: here in German language.

A bit of a visual outing as I allowed them to publish pictures while I am stuttering. Pictures that will be seen by ten thousand people. And the pictures were filling the upper half of two pages! A bit like a Playboy spread! ;-)

Holger Stenzel is dead

I received the sad news that Holger Stenzel is dead. He was well-known in Germany and with international experts for his keen interest in stuttering medication and his self-reports on using medication. Holger was also a great source for my blog, and constantly kept me informed on stuttering medication.  Check out these few posts where I talked about Holger.

He once came to visit me in Luxembourg. I was certainly impressed by his level of understanding on the functioning of neurotransmitters in the brain. His day job was as an independent electrician. He tried a few medication and wrote about his experiences, but none was ultimately very effective. He had high hopes for Pagoclone. Too high hopes, which ultimately left him deeply disappointed and probably without a fall-back option, I think. Which should also be a lesson for those that create those high hopes...

I am really sad to see him gone. Especially, as his sudden death was of course not an accident, but his own decision. Which makes me wonder whether stuttering played a crucial role or not. We will never know.

Holger, Vielen Dank für Deine Arbeit und Deine Unterstützung. Durch Dich war ich und alle meine Leser immer gut informiert! Wir werden Dich nicht vergessen und an besseren Therapien und Verständnis des Stotterns arbeiten: Medikament oder nicht!

Stuttering-language connection?

I have always questioned the connection between language and stuttering. Clearly, adults who stutter do not seem to show any language deficits. I have not observed a deficit in myself, nor in others. Studies showing a connection therefore must suffer from statistical error (correlation by chance), sample error (clinicians only see the extreme cases, i.e. children suffering from multiple deficits), and measurement errors (language ability measured wrongly), if I am right.

Here is an article by Nippold from the University of Oregon questioning the connection.

PURPOSE:

This article explains why it is reasonable to question the view that stuttering and language ability in children are linked, the so-called "stuttering-language connection."

METHOD:

Studies that focused on syntactic, morphologic, and lexical development in children who stutter (CWS) are examined for evidence to support the following claims: 1) that CWS, as a

Presentations are now on-line

The presentations from the Antwerp conference are on-line: here.

You can also find my workshop: here.

And the title, abstract and summary:

3. Title:

From genes to social context: Understanding and treating stuttering in a biopsychosocial framework

4. Abstract:

Genetic, neurobiological, behavioural, cognitive, and social factors contribute towards the dysfunction and handicap experienced by people who stutter, and are also key to an improvement of the condition. In an upcoming book, we propose an overarching

Meet up with TSB readers in Zuerich.

Yesterday, I met up with Lukas and other people in Zurich who stutter. They invited me for dinner. Thanks! We had a lot of discussions on stuttering, on my upcoming book, on disadvantages of covert and overt stuttering, and on finance.

I will soon put up a picture of three of us... unfortunately the others had already left.