Monday, October 11, 2010

A new documentary on stuttering

Check out the documentary by Joke Nyssen: here.

My name is Joke Nyssen. In April I completed my first feature documentary. STAMMERS tells the story of Jef, an 18-year old with autism spectrum disorder, who struggles with severe stammering. Together with his parents Jef made several unsuccessful attempts to overcome his speech problems. Now, years later, he decided to fight his stammering for the very last time. He is getting help from Gert Reunes, a therapist who specializes in stuttering and who struggled with his own words for over thirty years. Together they are working to improve Jef's fluency. And now that Jef feels there is hope again, he might be able to improve in other areas of his life as well.... STAMMERS has become a film about learning to speak again, excelling oneself and the great difficulties in the will to change.

We would like this film to reach as many people as possible. Therefore it would be a great opportunity for us if you could put the link to our trailer and our contact info on your blog and/or Facebook page. If you like it of course! You can watch the trailer here. (I couldn't embed the trailer...)

Link to Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stotters/116619985020709?ref=ts

Contact info: sophimages@skynet.be

3 comments:

Pascal said...

Now this is very interesting. I'm a stammerer with an autism spectrum disorder as well. Quite a rare combination. And difficult as well: both conditions impede social skills. I never thought I would see someone else with the same conditions. Never say never ;-)

Anonymous said...

what causes the combination of autism spectrum disorder and stuttering? (Tom, what are your thoughts)?

Ora said...

To Anonymous:

Your question "what causes the combination of autism spectrum disorder and stuttering" necessarily encompasses the question "what causes autism spectrum disorder?" The unfortunate reality is that the causes of a.s.d. are still only poorly understood. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_autism, for example.)

What do you think? Does that make sense? Do you agree?

Or are you suggesting that there's a correlation between a.s.d. and stuttering, i.e., that stutterers have a greater incidence of a.s.d. than non-stutters, or that people wtih a.s.d. are more likely to stutter than people without a.s.d.? Do you know of any evidence that that's the case? I've never heard of anything like this - though I have to admit that I pay more attention to information on stuttering than a.s.d..