You wouldn't be able to tell by listening to him today, but he's made it no secret — Joe Biden, once dubbed "Joe Impedimenta" in his Latin class, struggled with stuttering. Though he knows the pain inside out, calling stuttering the "only handicap that people still laugh about", Biden is also an embodiment of overcoming adversity and building resilience.
To other people who stutter, Biden said: "When you commit yourself to a goal and when you persevere in the face of struggle, you will discover new strengths and skills to help you overcome not only this challenge, but future life challenges as well. I promise you – you have nothing to be ashamed of, and you have every reason to be proud."
That fits right in with the theme of this year's International Stuttering Awareness Day, Journey of Words – Resilience and Bouncing Back.
It's also the kind of thing people without invisible disabilities often like to hear — that with perseverance and strength, it's possible to overcome just about any struggle and come out the other side a success story and an inspiration.
What is stuttering?
You'll no doubt recognize stuttering when reading the very common definition of "a speech disorder in which sounds, syllables, or words are repeated or prolonged, disrupting the normal flow of speech". You may know that a stutter often gets worse during high-stress situations, as well as that singing or reciting poetry can make fluent speech easier for some people who stutter.
Their everyday experience goes beyond what you may hear as they speak — adults who stutter, research shows, define their stutter not only as the difficulty with speech, but also as fearful anticipation, feeling stuck, and losing control.
Though much remains unknown about the mechanisms that lead to stuttering, more recent research has began to shed much more light in the causes. It's now known that stuttering has at least three distinct types:
- Developmental stuttering, the most common kind of stuttering, occurs in young children who are still developing their linguistic and verbal skills. It is now clear that different processes are at work in the brains of children who stutter than those who do not, thanks to brain imaging studies. Science has also established that at least four genes are implicated in contributing to developmental stuttering.
- Neurogenic stuttering can occur in people who have had a stroke or suffered other kinds of brain injuries. In this case, speech is affected by disrupted brain signaling.
- So-called psychogenic stuttering is rare. Once, it was commonly believed, including in the scientific community, that all stuttering resulted from psychological or cognitive factors, but though anxiety and stress can make a stutter more severe, today we know that this is not the case at all.
How does stuttering impact quality of life?
Stuttering can — thanks to the societal reactions it induces — have a profoundly negative impact on the quality of life of people who stutter. Research has shown that adults who stutter are more likely to face struggles in the domains of:
- Social interactions
- Reaching their potential in education and the workplace
- Mental wellbeing
- In cases where the stutter was caused by a stroke, the person is simultaneously faced with the reality of adapting to a life in which they cannot do the things they used to be able to
Research among children and adolescents who stutter has led to similar conclusions — that stuttering (and, very often, social reactions to it play a very large role in this) leads to a reduced quality of life, as manifested by emotional pain, struggling with social interactions, and struggling to communicate. The pain often remains even if speech fluency increases.
What can you do when you meet someone who stutters?
There is no cure for stuttering. Despite the many people who do attain fluent speech or find coping mechanisms that allow them to "pass for fluent", often after a lot of very hard work with a speech-language pathologist, we've seen that stuttering has a great negative impact on the quality of life of people who stutter.
We also know that, if we follow the social model of disability, it's not necessarily people's limitations that disable them, and it's never only people's limitations that disable them. Rather, as a society, the way we react to a person's differing characteristics can enable (and empower) or disable them.
The best thing we can all do is to always strive to empower while trying our hardest not to disable.
While there's no cure for stuttering, the National Institutes of Health offers information about treatment for stuttering that sheds a whole lot of light on this. Yes, there are promising developments in the area of "hard science". Those include clinical trials for certain medications that may be able to help people who stutter achieve more fluent speech, as well as electronic devices similar to hearing aids that speak "in unison" with a person and that can greatly increase speech fluency in short periods of time. Then, there is of course speech-language therapy as well as talk therapy (psychotherapy) to help people who stutter process the emotional difficulties they may be exposed to.
But — honestly — some of the "treatment" options for stuttering are no more than common sense, though that apparently isn't so common. They'd include making sure that people who don't stutter give those who do ample opportunity and time to speak, making sure not to react negatively or condescendingly to a stutter, and refraining from trying to complete the sentences someone who stutters is in the process of finishing. They'd also include being relaxed, and listening attentively, so that the person feels less pressure.
These guidelines were given as tips to parents of children who stutter, but they're garden-variety courtesy for everyone else, too. Those of us who don't stutter are in large part responsible for the pain of those who do stutter — and this International Stuttering Awareness Day is a perfect time to remember to be understanding.