Stammering: time for a radical rethink?

In this episode we are joined by a panel of speakers who discuss why it's important to reframe how society views stammering: moving from thinking of stammering as a problem to be solved, to one that celebrates and takes pride in difference.

Interviewees:

• Dr Patrick Campbell, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Kirsten Howells, Support Services Manager, Programme Lead for Adults, Stamma
• Jennifer Roche, Senior SLT and lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University

Resources:

• Stammering Pride and Prejudice by Patrick Campbell, Christopher Constantino and Sam Simpson (Editors), J&R Press, 2019 (Book)
• Find the Right Words campaign video from Stamma
• Editorial Guidelines for language around stammering, from Stamma
• Connecting with others who stammer, through online and in-person groups and professional networks, from Stamma
• Connecting with other parents of children who stammer, from Stamma
• No Diversity Without Disfluency campaign, from Stamma
• I don't need to be fixed - what I wish the world understood about stammering from Airedale NHS Foundation Trust

RCSLT resources:

• Automated telephone services: a statement from the RCSLT
• Twitter takeover by Paul O'Meara

The interview was produced by Jacques Strauss, freelance digital producer.

Please be aware that the views expressed are those of the guests and not the RCSLT.

Please do take a few moments to respond to our podcast survey: uk.surveymonkey.com/r/LG5HC3R

Transcript

MUSIC PLAYS: 0:00:00-0:00:10

HOST:                      0:00:09 Welcome to another RCSLT podcast. My name is Jacques Strauss. This is a special edition of the podcast to celebrate International Stammering Awareness Day. 

Stammering is, of course, an enormously complicated topic, and so we’ve assembled an interesting panel to share their views. How are our attitudes towards stammering and its treatment evolving? Indeed, is it something to be treated at all? 

As a layperson, I can say that stammering is one of the first things we as the general public associate with speech and language therapy. And so, it’s interesting to consider how this complex but relatively narrow area has come to define the public perception of the profession. But it speaks in a very interesting way about entrenched attitudes we have toward what is considered normal speech. 

I started by asking the panel to introduce themselves. 

JEN:                            0:01:02 Hi, I’m Jen. I’m a speech and language therapist working up in Oldham, in the Greater Manchester area. I currently just work with a specialist caseload of children and young people and adults who stammer, so all age ranges in Oldham. 

I’ve been working as a speech and language therapist for a number of years, a lot of years now, 17 years, and always really had an interest in working with people who stammer. I think that’s because stammering’s in my family, so it’s just always been around for me, and I’ve always been really comfortable with that. And I find it a really interesting and rewarding area to work in and with the people that I meet. It’s fantastic. I love it. I feel really blessed to be part of a job that is just so interesting as well. 

That’s me for part of the week, and the other part of the week I work for Manchester Metropolitan University, where I teach a number of things, but primarily stammering. 

KIRSTEN:                   0:02:04 Hi, I’m Kirsten Howells. I stammer myself, and I work for STAMMA, the national stammering charity previously known as the British Stammering Association. At STAMMA, I’m a programme lead for adults that stammer, and in that role I help to coordinate the helpline and web chat services, and I also coordinate the employment support service for STAMMA, where we offer guidance and support for individuals with issues related to stammering at work, and also helping organisations create more stammer-friendly environments for their staff and customers. 

And in the little bit of time that’s left over, I’m also a member of the National Dysfluency CEN and I edit the SIGNAL newsletter for the Clinical Excellence Network. 

HOST:                         0:03:07 Brilliant. Thanks, Kirsten. I wonder if you could just tell us a little more about what the overall mission of the charity is.

KIRSTEN:                   0:03:14 Yes, the mission has recently been revised. So, STAMMA’s mission is that we exist to create a world that makes space for stammering, where a stammer is embraced as just a difference, and where no one judges us on our stammer or on the way we choose to deal with it. And as part of that, we’ll stand up for and empower those who stammer and challenge discrimination wherever we find it. So, that is the primary mission of the organisation.

HOST:                         0:03:54 Fantastic. Thank you so much. And Patrick, I wonder if you could introduce yourself.

PATRICK:                   0:04:00 Hello, I’m Patrick. I’m a person who stammers and a doctor as well. I’m really interested in the idea of stammering pride, and also the ways in which society disables people who stammer. I recently ish – three years ago now – co-edited a book with Sam Simpson and Christopher Constantino, who are both speech and language therapists, that tried to bring together a motley crew of voices who are interested in stammering [inaudible 0:04:59] how people who stammer or disabled and stammering in the arts as well, and try and get a narrative out there where stammering is a difference rather than a defect. 

HOST:                         0:05:17 Because so many of us either work for or alongside the NHS, I am curious to know what kind of doctor are you? 

PATRICK:                   0:05:23 I’ve recently moved to Leeds. I’ve moved from paediatrics into clinical genetics. Not everybody’s always familiar with what clinical genetics is. As a specialty, we deal with inherited diseases in babies, children, and adults as well. That’s the day job.

HOST:                         0:05:54 Fantastic. We will absolutely put a link to the book in the show notes for anyone that’s interested and wants to go and check it out. 

I guess this might sound like a silly question, but it would be good to know for the lay audience: what is a stammer exactly? How do we define it?

JEN:                            0:06:18 Definitions of stammering is something which has been argued back and forth for decades, so there is no single agreed definition of what this thing that we call stammering is. 

But basically, for you to take it down to its basic form, it’s a neurologically-based speech difference that makes it intermittently difficult to physically speak, to get out the sounds and the words. And then around that, we have all the experiences we build up from that difference, and that will be our own internal responses to it, and the responses of other people, which might then affect how we deal with those moments of stammering. 

PATRICK:                   0:07:13 I would agree with Kirsten that it’s really hard to define what stammering is. Because I think you can think about what stammering is by what you see when somebody stammers. But the actual experience is really quite different. It’s almost like being caught in between this land in between words when you’re speaking, a sense of buffering in the moment. 

I think that people who stammer are starting to begin to reimagine what that space can be. So, the idea that these kinds of moments in time open up different types of interactions when we stammer, and that people can be together in the moment of stammering, and the little crack in the normal flow of time which it opens up. 

HOST:                         0:08:16 You’re effectively saying that stammer potentially introduces a new dimension to communication that we hadn’t… Instead of always seeing it as an impediment to communication, this break for us to think and just sit in the moment. 

PATRICK:                   0:08:31 I would write that down, Jacques, whilst you’re having that thought.

HOST:                         0:08:35 That’s really interesting. I don’t know, Jen, do you have anything to add? You said you have a number of family members that stammer and that’s what got you interested? 

JEN:                            0:08:41 I think I completely agree with what’s already been said. Stammering’s a way of speaking, fundamentally. It’s a different way of speaking to what’s expected. I think coming from a couple of different perspectives then, from a teaching perspective, what stammering is doesn’t align with what Patrick and Kirsten have just said – stammering is a disorder, and all of these words that we may talk about later. So, it is quite difficult for students to find definitions of what stammering is based on what they’re going to find on the internet that the research and the publications seem to be quite a way behind this in general. 

For the families and the people that I work with, what stammering is is often something they worry about. I think we always have to be really mindful as speech and language therapists that we’re only going to get people referred to us if stammering’s not okay for them on some level. And that’s not the majority necessarily, or that’s not everyone’s view. So, we can get a really skewed view of what stammering is because people, they’d be referred to us for help. Something about stammering for either the person or the family isn’t okay. 

So, I think we also need to think more widely about what the definition is of stammering. 

HOST:                         0:09:57 When I started doing my first work for RCSLT, my familiarity with the profession was The King’s Speech. And I assumed that’s what SLTs do, largely, is stammering. Actually, it’s a specialist field. It’s the minority of SLTs that deal with it. But that certainly shaped the public’s perception, and the fact that it is referred to a clinical discipline immediately does pathologise it. 

And that’s what we’re here to talk about today is about: is it something that needs to be treated? Is that one of the main questions that we should be asking? Is treatment necessary? How do we go about that question of the pathologising of something that doesn’t necessarily need to be pathologised? 

KIRSTEN:                   0:10:39 I think it partly comes back to what Jen was saying that, for starters, there are those really individual experiences of it, whether that’s an individual in themselves, or a family unit and their experience of it. So, it is really hard to say there is this one true path at the moment because we live in the society we do live in, and we’ve been shaped by those influences growing up, and our parents were shaped by those influences, and we’ve got the, the expectations of society around us. We almost have these two things, and can hold them both at the same time. We have this place that we’re moving to, but also the place where we’re living now, and the fact that you might have an exam on Thursday and a job interview on Tuesday, and somebody was horrid about stammering in a coffee shop last Saturday. And we’ve got all of that to deal with too. They feel problems, and these ideas about seeing stammering and stammered moments almost as opportunities, feel like progress, but they’re both existing simultaneously. 

PATRICK:                   0:12:09 I think we have to be very careful that these are individual views – particularly for me as a person who stammers. I, alongside others, us have written quite strongly for this stammering pride social model of disability outlook. And that’s something I believe is really useful to people who stammer to see their stammer as not a problem, and rather one created by the way society is structured. 

But at the same time, I don’t want to deny the lived experience of someone who stammers, who does find stammering very hard, either physically or mentally. 

And whilst I might say that some of that might be due to self-stigma, the stigma we absorb from the society around us, rather than our own view, I think that, ultimately, it’s each individual’s choice how they conceptualise their experience. 

HOST:                         0:13:17 Jen, I’ve got a question for you and your patients. You have this interesting and very progressive view about stammering. But the patients who come to you, what are their views about their stammer? What do they need? What do they want from you? I’m guessing there’s no one answer to that, but I wonder if you can paint us a picture. 

JEN:                            0:13:41 What are their views? Well, like I said, oftentimes people who are coming to speech and language therapy is because they see this as a problem, otherwise they wouldn’t be with us. So, let’s think about young children. It’s often parental worry. They’re worried about what will happen when. And you can move it to they start the new class at reception, or when they go to high school, and then we start thinking about who will they meet as a partner, will they get married, will they get a job? So, these worries are future worries quite often. So often the view of families is that, when we really talk about it, things are okay now, but they’re worried about the future. 

And just like Patrick said, it doesn’t mean that things are okay now, Things might be really tough for that young child. Really small young children can find it hard, and tell you it’s hard, and worry about it. So, we’re not there to create – I’m using inverted commas in the in the air – ‘a problem’. Just because they’re stammering, that does not equate to a problem, but it can be difficult for some people. So, we’re not there to equate stammering as a problem, but if something’s difficult, in understanding what stammering is for that family in their future worries, then we can work with that. 

And I think families do come to us, and young people, and adults, come to our services; sometimes they’re expecting something that isn’t aligned with what we’re talking about here. They’re expecting some kind of fix or fluency, and it’d be one of our roles there to really explore what stammering is and really what it isn’t. It sounds quite straightforward, but it’s quite a complicated conversation sometimes, or series of conversations, and in fact, a process that isn’t ever really finished, I don’t think. It’s continual, and it will ebb and flow. 

So, the views of families are really diverse. But often the little ones, its future worries. But children, very young children, can also be quite worried about how their talking is, and then we’ve got quite a big role, actually, in supporting that person, and the family. 

HOST:                         0:15:52 It will be interesting for the listeners that are a little bit about your personal journeys with stammering. Have they evolved? Has it changed? How was it when you were a kid versus where you are now? And if it has evolved, what do you think brought that about? 

PATRICK:                   0:16:07 I’m always aware that personal anecdotes are one person’s story. And I think that’s really powerful, but I’m also conscious of over-extrapolating my own individual experience. 

But for me, my journey has been one from quite deep shame and stigma, where I put a lot of effort and headspace into hiding my stammer, through a process of becoming more and more open about it, with lots of really cool and supportive people who stammer and people who stammer who inspired me. And some therapists as well, who helped me to think through that journey and that process, to a place of agency in my own voice, and this aim towards pride. 

Because I’m sometimes not sure that I’ve even reached stammering pride yet. I see this as this place we’re trying to get to on our own personal journeys, or I am. 

KIRSTEN:                   0:17:19 My experience has definitely changed over time. I feel like it’s very much still a work-in-progress. And where the endpoint of that will be, I don’t know. 

But as a child, I just used to mask it constantly. So, most people had no idea. But I went to quite extreme lengths through childhood and young adulthood to do that, which involved telling lies, and it was just really shameful, and a really, increasingly uncomfortable place to be. And I’m not in that place anymore, which is really way better! It’s way better than it used to be. 

But it’s still how I handle it varies quite a bit from situation to situation. It is more comfortable to be a person who stammers in some places and with some people than with others, for me. So, definitely changed a lot, but remains complex. 

PATRICK:                   0:18:30 I really enjoy the complexity of the experience. There’s something to the complexity and the different ways of looking at that really brought something to my life almost. And the fact that the journey remains incomplete, I value that bit. 

HOST:                         0:18:49 Jen, do we have any stats on the number of people that stammer?

JEN:                            0:18:54 There are some stats on the number of people who stammer, and they do vary. It depends on which stats you look at, really. We used to say that 1% of the world had a stammer. But I think that’s been revised upwards, for loads of reasons. But an awful lot, I think… I don’t know the number of 1% of the population, but about 1%. But the amount of people who stammer is much higher in younger age groups – as high as 8% some studies have suggested of young children who go through either periods of stammering that go away, where stammering doesn’t last, or periods of stammering that do last into adulthood. 

But about 8% of younger children. We think in preschool age, really, and about 1% of the adult population. Sizeable, isn’t it? There’s lots of stammering out there. 

KIRSTEN:                   0:19:54 Yeah, I think the only thing to add was that STAMMA does some YouGov polling each year. And in 2021, we polled 6,000 people, and within YouGov polling that’s supposed to be a sample of people who are representative of UK society. 

We asked questions about public attitudes, but we also asked: do you stammer, and then asked some follow up questions. And 2% of the respondents in 2021 said, yes. So, that’s interesting. 

HOST:                         0:20:29 We then went on to talk about the complicated issue of the language that’s used when talking about stammering. 

JEN:                            0:20:40 Personally, in newspaper and digital news media, there’s often a real theme of heroes and victims around stammering. It drives me mad, this idea… the language used: ‘terrible impediments’, and ‘suffering’ is often used to describe people who stammer, so you have this real victim portrayal of it, and almost like this is all of a person’s identity is surely subsumed by this one thing. 

And then you also get these ‘battled with the terrible impediment’. You’ve got these ideas around overcoming it somehow, and exactly what overcoming means is up for debate too. But it’s often portrayed in this heroes and victims. Neither of those roles is necessarily desirable. If these are the terms that it’s taught in in society, as someone who stammers, where do you place yourself? 

HOST:                         0:21:50 That’s almost the story of The King’s Speech, really, isn’t it? This overcoming, this heroic moment, and now I’m fully formed and worthy of being a monarch because I don’t stammer anymore. 

JEN:                            0:22:02 Yeah, and it’s really challenging. It’s really challenging. And we see that in lesser ways in the language around it. So, in 2020, STAMMA did a big campaign about this called Find the Right Words. And then we worked with Wikipedia to look at… and obviously Wikipedia is community-written entries developed over time. But looking at the entries related to people who stammer and the language used around that and just altering the language to things which were more neutral. 

HOST:                         0:22:41 Right. And so, Patrick, does stammering impact your work in ways, and does it ever still knock your confidence? You know, you now work in the specialist field. 

PATRICK:                   0:22:50 Is it still an issue? I’ve definitely had challenging moments in my career because I stammer. I particularly found medical school very difficult at times because of my experience of stammering. Whereas I think part of that was due to my own self stigma and the way I acted around stammering, I think that the university was quite unaware of the ways it should try to adjust to a person who stammers and the environment it should encourage and the ways exams might be changed so that so the doctors, nurses, health professionals, who stammer can succeed in them. 

So yes, at times it has been challenging in my career as I’ve became [inaudible 0:23:43] okay with my stammer. I found it easier and easier to exist in the world as it is and advocate for myself a bit more. I’m still not always very good at it. The more that I’ve been okay with stammering the more that work has been okay. But that doesn’t mean work… 

I think there’s a double-edged sword there, as in, how do you get okay with your stammer if your work isn’t okay? So, I think that my early moments in the NHS really reflect how difficult environment it can sometimes be for people who stammer at the same time. And just because things are okay now doesn’t mean they’re okay for everybody who works in the health service. 

HOST:                         0:24:30 What you guys are raising is there’s two issues here. There’s the issue of the personal work that needs to be done to potentially be okay with stammering. Then there’s the world that we need to look at and people’s attitudes towards it and the environments. We’ll get onto that, and how we think the world needs to the change. 

I’m going to ask you a slightly more specific question now, and I don’t mean to pathologise this again, but clinically, where are we with stammering? If a person comes to you and says, I want to be treated, I want to stop stammering, how good are we at treating it? Is there a simple answer, or are you going to say to me, ‘it’s just not that simple’?

JEN:                            0:25:11 It’s just not that simple! People do come to us and say exactly that: I want to stop stammering. And then there’s a conversation that we have where we think about, well, what would that mean? Okay, so let’s say talking was easier, and we take out the word ‘fluent’, ‘fluency’, not stammering. Okay, so let’s say talking was… and then choose another word like ‘easier’ or ‘comfortable’. What would that be like for you? What will you be doing? What will other people see? 

You have these conversations that are very much… they’re called solution-focused questions, but they’re about your preferred future, how you want things to be for you. And as a therapist, you get to know somebody on a very much deeper personal level, to find out what their life is like, and what they would their life to be. And you get a suggestion or a view of actual things, concrete things, that somebody would to be doing. And then we start to suppose whether and how we can achieve those things, do those things, with stammering. 

Actually, you can change quite a lot of people’s minds about what it is to stammer, because it starts to become clear that those things are all things for you; those are all things you can do with stammering and we start to move gently towards those. 

HOST:                         0:26:43 Then we come to the question of what is it that we can do? How can we change society? And what do we actually hope to achieve with International Stammering Day?

KIRSTEN:                   0:26:59 Yes, so for the last year, STAMMA has been campaigning for more and better representation of people who stammer in the media. And this is based in… The situation we have now, so we have International Stammering Awareness Day. It comes up every year on 22 October, and for one day only you’ll get loads of people on the TV and the radio all telling their own personal stories of whatever that journey has been. Then they’ll all go away again, and the next 22 October a new crop of people will get rolled out on TV, on the radio, stories about stammering, and gone. 

Probably better that than not that, but actually it makes it… it’s all about the stammering and not about… like, we’re people, and they see us just the way that we talk. 

So, the campaign has been called No Diversity Without Disfluency, and the idea that stammering is just an aspect of human diversity, and that we are underrepresented in the media. Eight percent of children stammer. Are there 8% of children stammering on kids TV? No. But imagine if we’re thinking about that societal stigma, what about if there were 8% of the kids on children’s TV programme, what if 8% of them just happen to stammer, but the programme isn’t about stammering, it’s about Peppa Pig or whatever! The Octonauts. All these things. 

What about if stammering was just there? What about if people who stammer were on documentaries, or were on debates on the TV, or in the dramas, and stammering wasn’t the point, it was just there? We would all be so much more used to it – the people who stammer and the people who don’t – and that seems really important. 

So, since the back end of last year we’ve had this campaign, and as part of that campaign we’ve had a petition to two TV companies about having greater representation of people who stammer within their programming and not just talking about stammering. We’re going to be handing in that petition to some of the media companies on Saturday, 22 October, and when the petition has over 25,000 signatures.

HOST:                         0:29:45 What I’m hearing there is this is a [DMI 0:29:49] consideration in the same way that we go, we need more representation of people of colour, we need gay people, and so forth, and disfluency is another area that we… We are beginning to think about neurodiversity, although probably not enough being done on that, but also disfluency, and so forth. So, it’s generally about changing that… thinking about representation. 

But then I’m interested, Patrick, to come to you. So, there are a couple of points. One was the question of stammering pride, but you also mentioned there were things that can be done in the NHS, also at university and so forth, that could that can make things easier for people that stammer. What are we not seeing enough of in terms of the response of the rest of the world, do you think? 

PATRICK:                   0:30:33 I’d really like to see the rest of the world make space for stammering, and make space to listen to us. I guess one example is when you go to Starbucks, you’re expected to order really quickly in this really fast, fluent way, and people who stammer just can’t do that. Similarly, in lots of interactions, voice-automated telephone systems, often they don’t understand people who stammer’s voice. We’re discriminated against by this high-paced society we live in that really values rapid fluid communication. And I think that’s something we have to try and very slowly, as a community – because it’s a challenging thing – challenge over time. 

My thoughts always lie with people who stammer themselves, and finding ways for themselves to both protest the world in which we live, but also try to create a new world which has pride in finding ways to celebrate stammering. I think the way we do that is by is through ourselves and finding our own things we enjoy. 

I’ve got a friend who’s a really good painter, and he paints people in the moment of stammering and that’s been his way to try and advocate and change society. Then there’s musicians who make disfluent music almost, and philosophers who integrate and think about stammering in their work. I think we can all advocate in our own ways with who we are as part of that. 

HOST:                         0:32:26 That’s so interesting, the point that you made, this issue of rapidity. It’s this essential value, this capitalist value, where everything needs to be super-fast. And then for you to say that stammering is a way to challenge the dominance and the unquestioning benevolence of rapidity is really interesting. It just changes the mindset entirely. And that comes back to that point of you were saying the way it’s a form of communication in a different way, and it takes a moment for us to step out. 

Jen, what are some of the changes that you think we need to see, maybe, in the world that would help, I guess?

JEN:                            0:33:10 I think all of the things you’ve already spoken about are going to be really helpful. Just having representation. Stammering is a way of speaking, and we don’t see it, though. And it would be wonderful for the families that I’ve worked with and the adults to see themselves represented on television, on the radio, in films and so on. 

And I think one of the things that that speech and language therapists can do is to link their clients in with those movements, in with those new ideas, and linking them up with each other, and people who stammer. 

At the recent STAMMAFest over in Liverpool that we had in August, I feel really complicit and part of something that’s happened where grown-ups are saying, this is the first time I’ve met another person who stammers. And I wonder, well, maybe you were, maybe you weren’t involved in any kind of speech and language therapy in the past, but what went on to mean that you were alone in this? The groups that I know wonderful places like STAMMA support the organisation of parent groups, and on STAMMAFest family day are just so powerful, and we can replicate that in clinics. We can get a kid along with another kid. 

Some kids don’t want that don’t want that, but we can show them. When there’s representation more easily, we can show them, and link them in virtually with other people out there who stammer. 

And the exact same for adults. The same goes for adults. I refer to children, it’s the bulk of people that I work with. But the same for adults. Speech therapy’s got a long history of trying to provide groups, but sometimes that’s not easy. But really persisting with that and linking in with really supportive groups like STAMMA. I think that’s something that we can do. 

Another thing we can do is to get the message out there. We have direct links with schools. We work in schools a lot of the time, and we can change how teachers… but not just teachers, how the lunchtime assistants, how the crossing patrol people, how all these people who interact with our children have a very powerful place to make stammering okay, and to understand what stammering is, and to know how best to respond generally to stammered speech. 

HOST:                         0:35:38 Yeah, for sure. In terms of representation, Kirsten, has Joe Biden made any difference to people’s perceptions of stammering? He doesn’t have an obvious stammer. Well, I don’t know, maybe. Does he? I’m not sure. I’ve never noticed it, really. But obviously, it’s a big thing and there was a huge Atlantic article about it and everything as well. 

KIRSTEN:                   0:35:57 I feel like we’ve said it a lot today. It’s complicated. I feel like, Joe Biden, he’s a complicated representative because he doesn’t come across as being particularly comfortable or open on a daily basis about it. It’s fabulous to have somebody who stammers in such a position. But he’s, I guess, as a representative of this broader stammering community, he’s a complicated figure because his own relationship with the way he speaks seems to be complex. 

PATRICK:                   0:36:40 I’m going to just completely agree with Kirsten, I think. And I think as a person who stammers who’s not lived the life he’s lived and lived in the society, his upbringing, his life as a whole, I find it very difficult to comment on the way he chooses to live with his stammer not knowing his own personal experience. 

HOST:                         0:36:59 We came back again to the question of the language that we use about stammering – good, bad, better, etc. Kirsten spoke about some guidelines that have been developed that can help SLTs and other professions that we’ve linked to in the show notes. 

Jen spoke about the work she does with our students and RCSLT recognises the need to look at its guidelines and what role it can play in helping to shift the language within the profession and outside of it. Very importantly, this includes paperwork, like case histories. Should we be using words like ‘worse’? Should we even be talking about case histories in the case of stammering? And Jen made the point that this applies beyond stammering to ADHD and autism, etc. 

I think what is clear is that stammering can be a very interesting way for us to rethink our attitudes to what is often simply difference in all walks of life. 

A very big thank you to Kirsten, Jen, and Patrick for their time. Please do rate and review the podcast, share it with your colleagues, so that we can advocate for the work of speech and language therapists wherever they are needed. 

Until next time, keep well, and I will leave you with some final thoughts from Patrick. 

PATRICK:                   0:38:12 Yeah, I guess speaking to the RCSLT group here, I guess I would just invite you to come alongside people who stammer – not over us, not above us, but working with us, engaging in our culture, our choices of language around how we speak, and coming to know the stammering community and the wonderful people and voices inside of it. To then be able to share with the people who stammer who you might meet in clinic. It’s been one of the great joys of my life meeting the world of stammering, this just collection of people. And I think that therapists have this unique chance to introduce more people who stammer to that world in a gentle understanding way, if they wish to. 

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