Re-imagining Stammering Therapy & Research – walkthrough

• Facilitating cultural competence and awareness
• Understanding the dynamics of stigma, self-stigma and masking and the psychological consequences of living with a concealable stigmatised identity
  
• Exploring the lived experience and feelings associated with stammering in an ableist world that privileges fluency
  
• Understanding minority stress and ableist trauma
  
• Supporting the development of new affirming narratives around stammering
  
• Finding own unique stammering aesthetic
  
• Disclosure and self-advocacy
  
• Community

• Public information and education programmes
• Reducing barriers – creating a stammer-friendly environment and culture
• Campaigning
• Lobbying
• Representation
• Cultural change
• Celebration of stammering and difference

• Disability viewed as a human rights issue.
• Direct challenge to the medical model & institutions within which most SLTs have been trained and work.

Calls into question:

• Principles upon which therapy is based.
• Roles of therapist/client.
• Language.
• Range of therapies offered.
• Types, forms and aims of research into stammering.

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If speech language pathology is the intervention that stuttering activists seek from the government, medicine and private sphere, there is at least a conversation to be had about its medical necessity […] The stutter itself is only a negative bodily development if making people occasionally wait an extra two to ten minutes is a pathological emergency. This is all just to say, the burden should be on speech pathologists to prove their legitimacy on something more than merely auditory aesthetics.

— Richter (2019, p.73-74)

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Call for action

• Ethical responsibility.
• Locating therapy discourse within wider disability/neurodiversity discourse.
• Call for broader focus of therapy to address roles that self-identity, society and social stigma play.
• Drive to enrich and enhance professional accounts.
• Co-authoring therapy knowledge.