Stuttering affects nearly 3 million American adults, including Vicki Schutter, who works as a secretary at Rice University. She's in charge of the Houston chapter of the National Stuttering Association, a self-help organization and support network for people around the country. Schutter sat down with Chronicle reporter Alexis Grant to talk about the speech disorder and how it has affected her life.
Q:
A: If I knew that, I would be a very rich person. Some people think it's caused by nervousness or anxiety, but everybody who is nervous and anxious doesn't stutter.
Basically they think it is some kind of short circuit or something in the brain. It's like there's this little glitch there. But what makes it especially difficult is that it's not the same for everybody. I never have met two people who stutter exactly alike. And, because of that, the same (treatment) won't work for everybody.
Q: Do kids who stutter usually grow out of it?
A: Statistically, the answer is yes. If a child is just stuttering lightly, there is probably no reason to panic.
But there are some things that you need to watch out for. If the child has stuttering in his family, even if it's a relative that he might never see, that is one red flag. A second red flag is if the relative is a woman, because there are four times as many males who stutter as females. The third thing is if they start to exhibit secondaries, then you should at least have them evaluated by a speech-language pathologist who has had experience working with children who stutter.
Q: What are secondaries?
A: Those are things that you do in the hopes that they will help you get the word out. For instance, some people will hit a rhythm (tapping her leg) and talk to a rhythm. The problem with starting secondaries or tricks like that is that even though they might help you for a while, the longer you do them, the less they're going to help you.
Q: Does speech therapy help?
A: I've seen it work for lots of people, but I've seen it work for even more people temporarily.
You have to concentrate on your speech every waking minute. Just imagine how difficult it would be if you had to think of how you were saying a word every time you opened your mouth. It makes it difficult to plan what you're going to say, because you have to worry so much about your technique.
Q: When did you first start stuttering?
A: My mother says I started when I was about 3 1/2 .
Q: How does it affect you?
A: It doesn't affect me now nearly as much as it used to.
The more I accepted myself, the easier other people seemed to find it to accept me.
Q: Have you ever not stuttered?
A: In 1978, when I was hit by a car when I was on my bicycle. I had a brain stem injury.
When I regained consciousness, I was perfectly fluent for the first time in my life, for about three or four weeks, and then my stuttering started gradually coming back. It's kind of like as my body healed from the accident, my stuttering healed also.
The weird thing was that even though I was speaking fluently, I didn't feel fluent. I felt like the stuttering was still there.
Q: How did you feel when you realized the fluency was temporary?
A: I wasn't happy. I had gone to Alabama to spend a week with my parents. I felt really, really bad because I knew it hurt them.
My father told me at one point that every night he used to pray that God would cure my stuttering. He said that after the accident, that he had walked into the hospital room and seen me lying there on the table, all battered and bruised, and he said he realized stuttering is nothing. He said he never prayed that prayer again.
Q: What should listeners do — or not do — when communicating with people who stutter?
A: You really don't need to finish my sentences for me. You will probably guess it right sometimes, but when you guess it wrong, I'll have to correct you and start over, which will just make it take that much longer. And another thing that listeners shouldn't do is to look away, because when you start speech therapy, one of the first things they have you work on is eye contact. And do not say, "Just slow down, take a deep breath."
Q: Can you tell me about the National Stuttering Association's annual convention?
A: The point is the NSA's motto: If you stutter, you're not alone. Most of us who stutter, when we were growing up, we were the only people we knew who stuttered. You go to the workshops, and you listen to the speakers, but the very best part is all of the people you meet. There is that connection that you don't get with anyone else, not even your own family.
Q: Is there anything I didn't ask you that we should know?
A: People who stutter are not some sort of psycho. For the most part, we're pretty normal people except we talk weird.
What causes stuttering?