Patience, please! I’m not dumb…

When was the last time you spoke with a stutterer? Were you impatient? Or even downright rude? Probably not, but some people are. And it affects the about 80 million people in the world that have a stutter. And just to clarify – we’re not smarter or dumber than anybody else; some of us just have a super hard time saying stuff.?

Having a stutter – or stammer (I’ll be using them both interchangeably) – is a hardship that in almost all its forms and shapes can be seriously debilitating for the lives of children, youngsters, and grown-ups. Their stammer may keep them from doing and wanting things. They can likely find themselves not good enough, things may simply seem out of reach, or they can’t face the ordeal of fighting the word and world.?

I’m one of the fortunate ones; I was neither bullied nor belittled because of my stammer. And I’ve have done reasonably well for myself over the last 50+ years. Three degrees, more than dabbled in communications with a lot of public speaking involved, authored several books, and today I work in an international executive leadership position with a lot of stuff on the side like podcasts and as chair of a newly erected policy association for stammers in Denmark, #danskstammeforum.

To be sure, though, stuttering is a handicap. For many people. It’s just not one of those disabilities where you get a reserved parking spot, a nice minivan kitted with lift, or can avoid disapproving looks when disembarking public restrooms for the disabled (which are often preferable to the usual gents and ladies; cleaner than the first and with shorter ques than the latter).

Nobody really knows why we stammer. Us who do just know that we do – and that we’re not alone. In fact, close to one percent of the world’s population (yup, that’s about 80 million people) chop up words when speaking. Or rather, when we’re trying to speak. That it’s seldom heard, though, can most likely be attributed to the fact that there are far between stutterers galping from street corners. We simply oftentimes don’t possess the psyche to do so. Not many news anchors or politicians with a pronounced stammer outside, of course, the present US big cheese, Joe Biden. And even he is ridiculed from time to time.

Our stutter differs. At one end of the spectrum, you’ll find those who only may seem in a linguistic haste. And at the other end those whose whole body freeze up, knuckles whitening as they grab the table in front of them in an unsuccessful attempt at engaging the letter or syllable, they just can’t seem to make friends with. While they go all blue in the face with their mouth, jaw, and tongue engaging in a twisted and scary grimace. Small children laugh. Grown-ups look away, embarrassed.

The latter stammerers often end up saying nothing at all. It’s simply too strenuous to fight both inside and out, and they usually find a way in life with as little vocal facetime with other people. But they do find spouses and often have offspring as darling as everyone else’s – that in most cases don’t have a stammer; but more on the genetics in a little bit.

Stuttering usually surfaces when children learn to speak. At ages between two and six. Between 5 and ten percent of all children will sport a stammer at some point, the longevity of which can be anything between a few weeks and several years. Boys have 2-3 times larger risk hereof than girls and the gender inequality just increases as the years pass. The number of boys continuing with their stuttering is about four times higher.?

Most children, though, outgrow their speech impediment. Both girls and boys. But about one in four will hang on to their stutter. Of which many will be impaired throughout their lives and probably find themselves seriously up the proverbial creek if it wasn’t for the paddles (not often enough) supplied by e.g., capable and dedicated speech therapists.

Explanations as to why we stutter are plentiful and also somewhat colourful. In olden days, folklore reasoning included that the child had eaten a cricket or that the mother, during her pregnancy, had laid eyes on some particular nasty type of snake. Others would have that the child’s hair had been cut before it spoke its first word or that the unsuspecting baby was unfortunate enough to spot itself in a mirror. Others again blamed mothers for leaving their child outside in the rain or surmised that the parents-to-be hadn’t informed the forefathers of the coming childbirth. It could also, slightly more mundane but equally inadept, be that the vocally impaired youngster’s tongue simply was too short.

The cure could be equally colourful. In China, a wise old one told a frustrated mother that the cure demanded she go all-in arsonist and start no less than 100 fires. She got around to lighting up 20 before being arrested. In 2002 (sic!), not medieval times, mind you.

Some places on the African continent the cure-of-choice was elephant dung applied to surgical incisions at the corner of the mouth and under the tongue. And elsewhere, again a more mundane but not rather successful approach, was to beat the crap out of the stuttering child. Sort of applying the tested and tried (and mostly failing) principle of keeping up the beatings until morale improves. To little avail, of course.

At the end of the day, though, a stutter is not likely to be caused by involuntary foraging of crickets. Or a tongue of less that optimal dimensions. But what is to blame, then?

Well, in the West, we have tended toward seeing stuttering as a result of mental trauma – blaming a really shitty childhood of sorts for the whole thing. And while such circumstances may certainly exist, such an underlying trauma is most likely to have instigated a whole set of other problems that are larger and more troublesome than a stammer.

More wholesome, but not necessarily more correct, has been the approach that our collective societal appraisal of oral accomplishments was to blame. That argued, as an example, the American psychologist, actor, writer, and researcher Wendell Johnson (himself a stutterer), who worked most of his life to find both reason and cure at the?University of Iowa.

An original hypothesis of his was that stuttering had to be a societal construct. He couldn’t, he argued, find one single case of stammer amongst native Americans. They didn’t even have a word for it, he put forward, and used this as an argument for defining stuttering as a culturally instigated condition: That Western culture’s obsession with grand, fluent, and elegant oratories, starting with the Greek, put so much pressure on us with less fortunate oral abilities that we were in principle forced into our stammers. Whereas peoples that weren’t corrupted by these societal demands for fluency, simply didn’t yield stutter. Much akin to Rousseau’s romantic thoughts on the noble and indeed uncorrupted savages.

Johnson did, though, at a later stage, revert from his position. There were indeed stammers to be found among native Americans. Maybe they just hid from him, having learned of his prior work with the Monster Study, an experiment performed on 22 normal speaking orphan children in Iowa in 1939. During the study, half of the children received positive speech therapy, praising the fluency, and the other half were belittled for speech imperfections. Of the latter group many, not surprisingly, suffered negative psychological effects. Some even retained speech problems for the rest of their lives (the University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001,?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Study).

Well, fast forward to present day, when stuttering, in lieu of clear cause-and-effect, in general is viewed as a multi-factorial condition. Environment is obviously one factor – that much we do know from Johnson’s cruel and unethical experiment – but there are very likely many more things at play.

Stuttering may as an example have a genetic component. Studies on twins have shown that our genes may be responsible for up to 80 percent of our stuttering. And yes, it makes sense, as stammering in some cases are passed on from one generation to the next – it can simply run in the family, and, as this is written, research has identified at least four responsible genes. On the other hand, no one in my family has had a stutter, and neither of my three (now grown) offspring have at any point in their childhood even stammered once.?

It’s quite the puzzle, really, and becomes even more so. Research at the University of Oxford has now shown that there are differences in brain activity of stammerers and fluent speakers. Whether the difference is good or bad is not really to be concluded, not at this stage anyhow, but there are apparently different synaptic pathways in play when we send signals from our speech centers to the complex of muscles and organs involved in speaking. Lately, at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles, researchers have apparently found that children with a stammer may have less blood circulation in their frontal lobes – but no-one has apparently yet dared to conclude whether it’s causal or correlating.?

On a potentially more offensive note, some have sought to correlate stuttering with higher IQ – probably stutterers who had grown tired of being belittled and ridiculed (it’s a quite common experience for us to be gauged as less fortunate in terms of mental capabilities) – and some have sought to show the opposite. The latter probably people that had grown tired of stutterers trying to outsmart them on paper. But also, I believe, without solid conclusions. And then again, the whole thing being somewhat irrelevant when considering the grand meta-discussion on what intelligence is in the first place.?

To me, I think it’s safe to assume that nature is so wisely crafted that people with a stammer are equally as smart, dumb, idiotic, empathic, insightful, or narrow-minded as everybody else – whether they are men, women, or graced with being situational gender fluid.?

In conclusion, any way we look at stammering, every discovery, revelation, and observation, well, they only add to the conclusion that stuttering really is a really, really complex thing.?

But if you’ve come this far in the text, I can only ask you to please do one thing when you meet people who stutter:

Have patience.

We may have a hard time saying stuff, but we’ll get there in the end. And we have exactly the same amount of tedious observations or golden remarks to share as everybody else.