Kill the Stammering

ijele (49)in #air-clinic • 8 years ago

Recently in my office a new Sales Director was recruited and everybody in the office including me was eager to meet this new Lady as a lot has already been said about her. On this faithful Monday I finally meet her and looking at her a tall gorgeous woman very endowed both physically and otherwise. She stretched out her hand for a handshake with me and said mmmmm ma ma my name is Aliicce, then I noticed she stammers it gave me serious concern, so I started searching for causes and remedies of stammering

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Stammering or stuttering as some would call it is a speech disorder where one normally has disruption in speech and mostly find it hard to pronounce word or letters like P, D, B, etc. This could be hereditary of developed at childhood. At the speech development stage of children speech process the brain develops nerves that enable fluency of speech in this process if the fluency is not achieved it mean that the wiring of the nerves is in disorder it could also occur due to a child’s inability to control the muscles of the organs of speech, or a child’s inability to control the tongue and lips or the obstruction of the speech organs. Stammering at early stage of development could be referred as developmental stammering which could normalize as one grows older, but some do persist making it hard for the nerve to return to normal. Some stammering occurs as earlier pointed due to hereditary factors and some at old age due to conditions like stroke.
Stammering in terms of intellectual ability are no less than normal persons just that most of them are presumed to be shy in public and studies has shown that approximately 1.5% of the world population do stammer.

Treatment

The treatment of stammering are mostly therapies that involves psychology and can be divided into two
Direct and indirect Therapy.

Indirect Therapy:
This is basically done at the early stages of the child’s life. In this case the parent of the child speaks with care and consciously reduce the speed of at which they speak to the child and encourage the child to speak with more ease in public and consciously also try to increase the confidence of the child because that is the greatest side effect that affects stammering individuals the parent should also listen attentively when the child is speaking and they should not try to always complete words for the child when he or she is stammering. When the child is above six and the stammering persist, you move on to the next stage of therapy which is the direct therapy.
Direct Therapy:
This is when you make the person or child aware that he stammers and suggest treatment through the help of a speech and language therapist (SLT) to ascertain the best possible types of treatment suitable for the patient. Each person may react differently to different types of therapy that is why you must use the speech language therapist. Some of the speech therapy are elaborated below

Fluency Shaping Therapy: this is when the patient takes conscious step to improve the fluency of speech by trying to speak slowly and taking some speech exercises that include pronouncing the letters A, E, I, O and U and moving the face in an awkward manner when ever the stammering comes into play. Another exercise is the tongue exercise where the patient tries to use his tongue to touch the roof of the mouth and then drag it backward towards the back of the mouth. After that bring out the tongue out of the mouth and try to use it to touch the down part of your jaw repeat this 4-5 times three times a day. Breathing exercise is another form of exercise one can do the reduce the effect of stammering, in this case you inhale deeply and exhale slowly through the mouth, Inhale deeply stick out your tongue and exhale slowly, then finally inhale deeply and press your chest muscles hard and exhale slowly. Do these steps as often as possible it helps reduce tension while speaking. Reading exercise is another way to discover the syllables that causes stammering and then practice it pronunciation regular to increase confidence while pronouncing those words also we should note that singing also is a very important exercise that reduces stammering.

Modification Therapy: In this case the therapy tries to modify the speech method in other to increase fluency it also tries to reduce fear and helps avoid behaviors that leads to stammering thereby increasing confidence. There are three stages in modification therapy. These are identification; when the therapist tries to identify the causes and behaviors that leads to patients stammering. Desensitization; in this case the therapist tries to reorient the patients identified behavior and it also involves the stammerer telling people that he stammers and accepting the situation. Modification; at this point this when the patient speaks and stop at moment of disfluency on interjections to repeat the words that caused the stammering. This leads to stabilization where the person practices his or her new skills until he or she speaks fluently.

Anti-stammering Devices: This device is a device that tries to modify a person’s voice and the patient listen to his voice using a headset. He/she either hears the voice on a higher frequency or hear them in a delayed fashion. This result has shown great progress in helping stammering persons modify speech to improve fluency.
Anti-stammering Medication: Some medications like dopamine antagonist medications have been found to remedy stammering to the tone of 50% but the challenge it has is that it has been discovered to have side effect.
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Psychological Therapy: This basically does not treat stammering directly but reduces the effect of stammering on an individual thereby reducing stammering. Some of the treatment include; solution focused brief therapy(SFBT), neurolinguistics therapy, Personal construct therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Having Listed these therapies there are some items we need to observe not to do as it does not in any way help stammering instead it increases it in the long run these include but not limited to:
Changing word, avoiding some speaking situations, looking away for the person who is listening, nodding your head or moving your body, adding extra sound or word etc.

Thank you for reading it is pertinent to point out again that stammering does not in any way make one less intelligent than the other.