Stuttering
[4] Persistent stuttering into adulthood often leads to outcomes detrimental to overall mental health, such as social isolation and suicidal thoughts.
[5] Stuttering is not connected to the physical ability to produce phonemes (i.e. it is unrelated to the structure or function of the vocal cords).
It is also unconnected to the structuring of thoughts into coherent sentences inside sufferers' brains, meaning that people with a stutter know precisely what they are trying to say (contrast with alternative disorders like aphasia).
Despite the negative physiological outcomes associated with stuttering and its concomitant stress levels, the link is not bidirectional: neither acute nor chronic stress has been shown to cause a predisposition to stuttering.Common stuttering behaviors are observable signs of speech disfluencies, for example: repeating sounds, syllables, words or phrases, silent blocks and prolongation of sounds.
[9] Feelings of embarrassment, shame, frustration, fear, anger, and guilt are frequent in people who stutter, and may increase tension and effort.
[29] In a 2010 article, three genes were found by Dennis Drayna and team to correlate with stuttering: GNPTAB, GNPTG, and NAGPA.
[43] The SLP may collect a case history on the individual through a detailed interview or conversation with the parents (if client is a child).
In particular, the therapist might test for factors including the types of disfluencies present (using a test such as the Disfluency Type Index (DTI)), their frequency and duration (number of iterations, percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS)), and speaking rate (syllables per minute (SPM), words per minute (WPM)).
Children and adults are monitored and evaluated for evidence of possible social, psychological or emotional signs of stress related to their disorder.
Some common assessments of this type measure factors including: anxiety (Endler multidimensional anxiety scales (EMAS)), attitudes (personal report of communication apprehension (PRCA)), perceptions of self (self-rating of reactions to speech situations (SSRSS)), quality of life (overall assessment of the speaker's experience of stuttering (OASES)), behaviors (older adult self-report (OASR)), and mental health (composite international diagnostic interview (CIDI)).
However, the specific rationale for this change from the DSM-IV is ill-documented in the APA's published literature, and is felt by some to promote confusion between the very different terms fluency and disfluency.
[34] This type of disfluency is a normal part of speech development and temporarily present in preschool-aged children who are learning to speak.
Its symptoms tend to be homogeneous: the stuttering is of sudden onset and associated with a significant event, it is constant and uninfluenced by different speaking situations, and there is little awareness or concern shown by the speaker.
Later studies found that this claim was not supported by the facts, so the influence of cultural factors in stuttering research declined.
It is generally accepted by contemporary scholars that stuttering is present in every culture and in every race, although the attitude towards the actual prevalence differs.
Some believe stuttering occurs in all cultures and races at similar rates, about 1% of general population (and is about 5% among young children) all around the world.
The largest number of studies has been conducted in European countries and in North America, where the experts agree on the mean estimate to be about 1% of the general population.
For example, morphological and other linguistic differences between languages may make presentation of disfluency appear to be more or less depending on the individual case.
[78] Because of the unusual-sounding speech that is produced and the behaviors and attitudes that accompany a stutter, it has long been a subject of scientific interest and speculation as well as discrimination and ridicule.
People who stutter can be traced back centuries to Demosthenes, who tried to control his disfluency by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.
[79] The Talmud interprets Bible passages to indicate that Moses also stuttered, and that placing a burning coal in his mouth had caused him to be "slow and hesitant of speech" (Exodus 4, v.10).
Hieronymus Mercurialis, writing in the sixteenth century, proposed to redress the imbalance by changes in diet, reduced libido (in men only), and purging.
Less drastically, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard placed a small forked golden plate under the tongue in order to support "weak" muscles.
[79] Italian pathologist Giovanni Morgagni attributed stuttering to deviations in the hyoid bone, a conclusion he came to via autopsy.
The Academy Award-winning film The King's Speech (2010) in which Colin Firth plays George VI, tells his story.
Louis J. Alber, who helped to arrange a lecture tour of the United States, wrote in Volume 55 of The American Mercury (1942) that "Churchill struggled to express his feelings but his stutter caught him in the throat and his face turned purple" and that "born with a stutter and a lisp, both caused in large measure by a defect in his palate, Churchill was at first seriously hampered in his public speaking.
"[This quote needs a citation] For centuries "cures" such as consistently drinking water from a snail shell for the rest of one's life, "hitting a stutterer in the face when the weather is cloudy", strengthening the tongue as a muscle, and various herbal remedies were tried.
[87] Designed to support people with a stammer in the Philadelphia area, the club took inspiration for its name from Charles Kingsley.
[citation needed] Other support groups for people who stammer began to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century.
The club was formed in response to the tragic case of a man from Sydney who "sought relief from the effects of stammering in suicide".
