Dr Thushanie Jayasuriya is a Sri Lankan SLP and a precious friend of TISA. He has kindly sent this article for sharing with our readers. It was published on 24th October 2009 in the Daily Mirror, a local news paper in Sri Lanka. We congratulate and thank Dr Thushanie!

Stammering is a communication impairment that affects the basics of verbal communication. Usually the effects of stammering of a stranger that we meet on the road does not strike us, as it is just a passing moment in our lives: so we have learnt to pay little attention. But it becomes a little more personal when a friend, family member, our spouse or more seriously our child actually stammers. This is when the fear and the stigma about stammering start hitting us. What will happen to my child? How will he/ she be viewed in the society? Will stammering cause limitations on the life of my close one? All of these fears and concerns we have as observers, but do we stop a moment to ask how the person who stammers might actually feel and how the handicap is affecting his/ her life?
As a clinician working with this group of individuals (speech and language therapist), I have come across a number of people with this speech disorder. Each of us is a unique individual and each person who stutters has a unique story which is molded by their experiences. Intervention with these individuals needs a lot of care and understanding. There is no one fix model or a universal rule to use as an approach to cure stammering, as this disorder does not discriminate or segregate ethnicities or communities . with each passing day we understand more about this sort or an invisible speech disorder. Why I call it invisible is because most of the time the actual difficulties associated with stammering is invisible to the observer’s eye.

The experience of stammering is such a personal experience one that makes you wonder if research being conducted on stammering across the world can actually bring out the real emotional and experiences that these individuals go through during episodes of stammering. I have had in my clinic youngsters with their anxious parents desperate to find a cure to their child’s problem but hand no clue about the feelings of fear that their child goes through each time the child has to say a word due to the stammer. On most occasions parents fail to see the feelings of frustration and limitation that their teenage children some times go through; these restrictions in speech could result in anger and denial. Then there are  others who barely recognize that they have a stammer because they are so used to avoiding words that are difficult to pronounce. They feel like a stammer within themselves; on one can see their isolation their world. There are dozen billion examples that I can bring out to explain the experiences of stammering that each of these individuals go through.

When it comes to stammering we mostly associate negative things. In my early years as a clinician I used to have the same assumption and concentrated mostly on the difficulties due to stammering. But at the same time, I learnt one of the most valuable lessons in life. One day when I asked one of my clients whether there was any good things stammering has brought into this life he replies” I am a good listener because of my stammer. It gives me the extra moment to listen to the other’s sentence completely, even though my mind has already constructed an answer to what I have half listened to. That extra second I block on a word gives me time to give a more complete answer”.

As a speech and language clinicians each client who walks into our clinic is a unique case which will present with their own set of strengths, challenges and difficulties. There are general strategies that we could use to help the client to manage the general speech behaviors. The rest of our approaches and skills will focus on helping the client to cope with the feeling and their past and present experiences.

This article is written to develop public awareness and evoke a little more consideration of our fellow colleague and friend. So that we may develop a little more understanding and help us coexist in harmony. It is with these aspirations and goals we celebrate the International Stammering Awareness Day on October 22, this year (2009).