Monday, February 08, 2010

The Faces of Stuttering

My name is Mark Bulger, and I live near Boston, Massachusetts, USA. At 55 years old, I'm approaching a half-century of stuttering. Since leaving an ineffective therapy program at about 12 years old, I have been free of and entirely uncontaminated by stuttering therapy. Today, by virtue of patience and the passage of time, my stuttering is much improved over my early years. My education in biology predisposes me to see stuttering as a condition with an organic basis, and makes me very skeptical of much theory and research in the field.

Tom has been kind enough to invite me to guest post on The Stuttering Brain. I will try to focus on stuttering research and opinions voiced in the stuttering therapy community.

10 comments:

Dave Rowley said...

Looking forward to hearing your views on the research!

Tom Weidig said...

Hi Mark,

Welcome to your new job! I have agreed with Mark that he will write 1-2 posts per week. He is educated in genetics, so should be able to give us a better perspective than myself.

Oh Mark, I just re-sized your picture! It is best not to link to pics, but copy the picture location and upload and then re-size. I don't want your pic to scare the readers! ;-)

Best wishes,
Tom

Mark B. said...

Tom - I'm confused about the picture. I uploaded it last night and it appears now the same as it did then. I'll have to look at the code next time.

Tom Weidig said...

But the picture was much bigger when i saw it, and i re-sized it?

Tom

Anonymous said...

Cool blog you got here. I'd like to read a bit more concerning this matter. Thanx for giving that information.

Anonymous said...

what is your education in biology, are you dennis drayna?

Anonymous said...

Great, just what this blog needed - another person to say how ineffective speech therapy is. Marvellous.

ig88sir said...

Hey Mark,

Can you explain how you became more fluent later in life? Does confidence have anything to do with it? A less severe amygdaloid response? Article link:

(http://www.veilsofstuttering.com/reactinh.html#Spontaneous)

Anonymous said...

So Speech Therapy was worthless and a waste of money? Please tell the truth.

Mark B. said...

ig88sir

It seems to be common for stuttering frequency and severity to subside at around age 35, which fits my example pretty good. My improvement was gradual, and only noticed over years. I still stutter every day, and I'm sure I'll stutter to the day I die. If I put myself on the spot, I would still stutter considerably, but most of my talking now is casual conversation - I'm not a telephone salesman or radio announcer. ;-)

I don't know what therapy would have done - I only know what happened without it.