I must admit I arrived with a little apprehension, this was the first time I had attended a public event related to stammering. I was aware that I was wearing two hats, as a person who stammers and a psychologist who has a special interest in working with PWS. The opening remarks by Mark Malcomson … Read more
Most of us will likely agree that the brain of a person who stammers works somewhat differently to the brain of someone who is fluent. What is not so clear, is how it is different. Earlier this year Dr Soo-Eun Chang at the University of Michigan spoke to Peter Reitzes from StutterTalk about her research … Read more
As a speech and language therapist and researcher, Mark Ylvisaker inspires my work. Mark was both a speech and language therapist and philosopher, and someone who passionately devoted his life to working with people with brain injury. Back in 2007, he said “in the absence of meaningful engagement in chosen life activities, all interventions ultimately … Read more
Dom: ‘Post brain injury life is about staying busy and in touch with the world. To that end one of the things I go to is a group set up by my counsellor Cathy that we tentatively call ‘Culture Club’. No, we don’t sit around and discuss Boy George! Once every two months a group … Read more
This month Sam is guest blogger for the Did I Stutter? Project – you may read her blog here
I like to be really transparent. Early after a TBI, I had such magnificently apparent social communication impairments that my verbal blurts were excused. As I recovered in visual processing, attention, balance, auditory processing, and something else I can’t remember (probably memory), I looked a lot less disabled. That made the blurts more noticeable and … Read more
How can we help people who stutter come to understand stuttering as something other than the negative opposite of fluency? We can begin by exploring with them the mechanisms of ableism that position those with disabilities as inferior. People do not exist in a vacuum. Discourses that give meaning to our world pre-exist our births. … Read more
We all start out with dreams and ideas about how our careers will go. It’s hard to foresee when, where or why the forks in the road will come, but it is almost certain that they will. This blog post explores two key ways in which supervision helped me to negotiate a fork in the … Read more
Supervision. The word invokes many different thoughts for me. The many supervisors I have had, and the many people I have supervised. And the formality of the word. I got a bit stuck when trying to move past this, so I read through multiple blog posts about having one’s communication shaped, ‘therapyed’ or embraced. These … Read more
An aneurysm ruptured in my brain when I was 27. The facts are simple enough. Yet, I find this topic resists such simplicity. I had been an American abroad, touring a show to the International Fringe Festival in Scotland. I was onstage when it happened, though I don’t remember when I stopped singing. I don’t … Read more