I truly believe that the only people who can answer the question, from the title of this article, are people who actually have or have overcome a stutter themselves. For reasons that I am not aware of, I developed a stutter when I was just four years of age. Despite attending speech therapy at regular intervals, the problem continued for the next eighteen years. I decided to follow an alternative route to cure my speech impediment, a route that was to prove successful when I was aged twenty-two. I have no doubt that the speech therapists do an admiral job up and down our country, however do they offer any real help for people who stutter?
It came as quite a shock for my parents when they heard that I was having great difficulty in saying certain words. In an attempt to help me, they contacted the local speech therapy unit. They were advised that I was still very young and that many boys of a similar age have similar issues with their speech. It was very likely that I would soon grow out of it. It was in their eyes, just a phase.
This was a great relief for my parents as they had feared it could be here to stay. Now I am sure a lot of people do grow out of the problem, I was however one of the ones that didn't.
A year later my speech was becoming out of control. I would stutter on a number of words, especially the ones beginning with the letter "b".
My parents enrolled me on a speech therapy course, I was to see a speech therapist once a week for twelve weeks.
I was given a lot of advice. The advice however was quite basic, speak slower and remember to take a deep breath before you speak. This was certainly not enough.
Speech therapy was a great frustration, I was desperate for it to work, however it did not help me to overcome the stutter.
I eventually decided that speech therapy was not for me. I then went about trying to find my own cure for stuttering.
Stephen Hill runs The How To Stop Stammering Centre, he has a number of websites including:
stammering treatment
stuttering help
help for children who stutter
