My young son, now 7 (no stutter), did stutter at age 4 and had some level of anxiety. My wife and I discovered that he has an allergy to annatto, a natural seed used for orange dye & nutty flavor, that triggered the stuttering. The stuttering was likely due to slight inflammation in his brain. In this case, slice of organic American (orange) cheese caused him to stutter within 10 minutes. Then we could tell when he had goldfish crackers for snack at school (dad, they weren't purple crackers, they were orange -- said with a strong stutter). His stuttering disappeared within a couple months of removing annatto foods from his diet. What about the annatto ~triggered inflammation, we do not know (I have an idea, but it's pretty hard to test).
Oh wow, incredible comment. I looked this up and apparently allergies are pretty strongly linked to stuttering. It's a connection I'd never assume to be possible.
As someone who sometimes has weeks of cluttered speech, and weeks where I'm perfectly fine, I'm now wondering if diet could be a contributing factor.
Food allergy is one of the reasons I theorize many people find different seemingly unrelated symptoms disappear when either fasting or on a low carbohydrate diet (even things like seizures).
It alters your diet so dramatically and greatly reduces the types of processed foods you can eat.
My stutter has been my primary source of stress/anxiety for that last 12 years. Its impacted my time in college and then later at Grad School. I've had good days and bad (more good days lately), but i'll never forget the terror I used to feel whenever I had to present something in front of other people.
I skipped classes to avoid doing that, i bombed many a presentation because I had trouble with certain sentences and it impacted my grades. I think not being able to make the best of time in grad school is something I can get over eventually, but a bigger regret I have is not being able to make meaningful connections with my peers in school because I'd avoid hanging out with people because of my anxiety over my stutter. In a way it almost feels like I never experienced
I still have issues with words starting with "A" which is unfortunate since my name starts with an A. I still speak really quickly which i think comes from a habit of trying to get through speech quickly to get it over with.
I do believe that a lot of it is mostly because of my anxiety as I speak just fine when i'm relaxed, and I've been trying to work on using different words when I feel like certain phrases/words will cause problems.
It’s ironic you stutter on A because I stutter on D and M, my initials, probably more than any other sounds. Stuttering is such a head game that I think it must be that you end up stuttering more on sounds that are more important to you. For example: I worked in finance a while and started stuttering on the word “million” more than I ever did before! Then I stopped working in finance and that basically went away. Still kind of a tough word, but not very problematic. These days I’m working on a messenger and I kid you not the word “message” is hard to say. It’s pretty absurd.
I am sorry to hear your experiences. I hope you're in a better position mentally - I feel like it is a feedback loop effect: Stuttering causes anxiety which causes more stuttering. I had similar (not stuttering) problems when speaking in social settings. I discovered some techniques like breathing control, always thinking about what life means to me - "The king and the pawn, all go back into the same box after the game is over". I found that through some behavioral therapy, I don't have social anxiety because every situation I handle - I handle it like I am in no way obligated to please these people and even if shit hits the fan, it is not the end of the world. We are all here for a temporary period in our lives...some 80 years or so.
Not sure if this would work for others, but this is how I see the world. It helps me battle stress.
He developed his stutter years ago after a softball accident (hit him in the throat). He ended up getting into standup comedy and is becoming pretty big.
All this is to say that the "impediment" actually adds character to him and makes him a lot more interesting and memorable in good ways. Maybe you can reframe your stutter in this positive way as well.
This is my exact experience. I am in college right now and I avoid taking courses that have a presentation component. My stutter really comes up if people are paying attention to me. Many a times, I have ended up saying I don't know the answer when I did know but just could not say it and did not want to waste everyone's time.
I took speech therapy classes once, but unfortunately did not complete them. My stutter is still there but I can now at least reduce it a lot.
I have a stutter. I went to a speech and language therapist, which helped a little bit. For the longest time I couldn't say words like "Wednesday" (stuttering on the W) or even simple phrases like "Yes sir/ma'am" when at secondary school (I believe this is known as a "block", my mouth just wouldn't work; I froze up).
I'm not entirely sure what helped me overcome the problem. If I'm relaxed, my speech is fluent. If I take deep breaths and think about what I'm going to say, the stutter rarely shows up. There are, of course, some words that I mispronounce still like "manipulative".
The only real ongoing issue is the learned habit of speaking quickly to try and overcome the stutter. Internally, I can understand exactly what I said, but externally it apparently comes out as a stream of unintelligible words. That's something I'm still working on.
The stutter comes back when I'm tired, nervous, or stressed. Apart from that, it's barely noticeable which I am pleased about.
How curious to know that it's all in the brain rather than a psychological cause such as anxiety which is what my parents used to assume. Perhaps I shall have to volunteer to help with future research.
What if the stress level affects the dopamine level and that affects the stutter?
I have a stutter too and this was a very interesting article to add to my "head-canon" on why people stutter. My stutter is also affected by moods. Maybe we're living -- or rather, speaking -- on the edge of the brain-body connection.
Do you stutter when you are not hearing yourself? For example, if you record yourself with headphones on playing very loud music so that you can not hear your own voice, will you still stutter saying all those things or reading the stuff you stutter on?
> How curious to know that it's all in the brain rather than a psychological cause such as anxiety
I'm not sure this model of thinking is fully correct. In a way, it's like saying that muscle cramps are all in the muscle rather than in their lack of hydration or their being overworked.
The substance of thought, emotion, and cognition is synapses firing, neurotransmitters transmitting, and neural connections being made. Like muscles, their movements flow as a result of environmental inputs, and environmental inputs that are stronger create stronger adaptations towards them.
The article doesn't say that it's all in the brain.
Exactly like me. I can say any word, surprisingly in a better way, when I'm alone. I struggle primarily with words starting with T, D like Trajectory, Tutorial, and few more.
Have a stutter too, I was in speech therapy from when I was 7, and one of the techniques that worked best was to focus on breathing and relaxation. When I blocked on words, the levels of tension in my body was/is extremely high. Specifically in my diaphragm, when there is tension, my chest is more rigid and the tension in mouth and tongue is so much stronger. So they had me focusing on relaxing my diaphragm which would allow the other tension to be less. So to focus on my breathing and being relaxed. (and yes I could sing fluidly, but my speech was very very blocky.)
The interesting thing was that this required thought and awareness, which is a bit difficult when you are younger. As I got older my confidence came, so became more relaxed in company and therefore less tense and so likely to stutter. I still do on occasion, but I am less concerned about it these days.
Something I've always been curious about: does the physiological stress or the psychological stress come first? Do you think "I'm stuttering" first, or does that tension you experience precede it?
I was in speech therapy from a young age, too, and breathing helped, but I had to go a bit further than just focusing on breath control. What really flipped the switch for me, after I had breath control down, was elongating the initial sounds of words when I felt a bit unsteady in my speech. This gets a bit complicated for stop consonants, like b or d; luckily, drawing out the sound made when everything is "in position" helps. For b this is m, and for d it's n.
Anyway, it's a "resetting" technique, forcing me to coordinate everything by holding things steady for a bare fraction of a second when they threaten to fall out of sync and cause a cascading failure. It wouldn't work without breathing, but breathing alone didn't quite do it for me.
(Interestingly, relaxing wasn't quite a necessity: I never stuttered when I yelled in anger.)
I got rid of my childhood stutter near instantly when someone told me that it was becuase I was thinking three sentences ahead of where my mouth was. All I needed to do was slow down the "speech in your head". I could still think ahead; I just needed to not internally vocalize my future words, and it all went away like magic.
Same! Bad stutter in early elementary school, but fine later after some speech therapy. Mine was most likely a sign of the ADHD to come, as well as a dash of my tourettes.
I used to have a feeling on what words I would stutter, I still do, and accordingly pick a trajectory of words that would divert me from that particular word, which would sometimes comes a bit off, most of the time successful. Paradoxically I would scan what I would say in advance, and usually while talking would scan sentences that would come very soon in connection to the one I am speaking. If I notice there is a possible stutter word I would do what is possible to avoid that word, and think of a substitute. If I cannot find a word or the stutter word is coming very soon, I would prolong the current sentence or thought adding extra words or doing some non verbal gestures. After many years this practice became fluid.. I used to suffer much and wonder how my life would play out if I didnt suffer, I would imagine all kinds of scenarios that might have happened, situations where I stayed silent instead of speaking up. Sometimes I would notice people would get tired of listening to me or, more true, if I senses I had difficulty in talking I would not say what and how I really wanted to say.. I did learn to stay silent and listen to other people, I also became a musician and sometimes I wondered is it because of my stutter. Who knows, it has been interesting for sure..
I have a stutter. Years of speech therapy as a kid did very little to solve the problem. The only thing that helped somewhat was a device called the "Speakeasy". It looked similar to a hearing aid, and essentially played back what I said to me. The insight was that when people who stutter speak along with someone, they tend to stutter less. I've also noticed I don't stutter at all when singing along to a song. It kind of ties in with this study; your brain knows exactly what speech to form, so the "weak" connections are sufficient.
Really happy about the progress being made in this field. Stuttering has been both a cause and result of my social anxiety, which people often mistake for aloofness or worse. Can't wait to try new therapies!
I was once given a device called the 'Edinburgh Masker', it was a set of headphones and a throat mike (I looked like a ww2 bomber pilot..) and it played a tone when you got stuck on a word. It was very weird, but quite interesting, as the tone would be so distracting that you forgot about the block or the repeated sound!
I had a stutter as a young kid, went to speech therapy, the usual story here it seems. While some breathing and relaxation helped, mentally I always had a distinct picture of why the stutter was there.
For me, it was always the simple appearance that my mind was thinking far faster than I could talk, and that would get in the way the farther I thought ahead and could no longer "multitask" on the two "threads" coherently, forcing a bit of a reset. As I got older, I lost my stutter mostly but I speak quite fast. To the point that many of my friends have to get used to my speech when the see me for the first time in a while. I have to consciously tone down the speed for some public speaking events (which I generally handle well otherwise). This is something I honed mostly over middle/high school. In some ways, I solved this whole issue in reverse - speeding up my speech rather than slowing my thoughts, though of course there was a bit of meeting in the middle.
I wonder if this section might be relevant to my case:
> During the 1990s, Maguire and colleagues were among the first to use a certain kind of brain scan, positron emission tomography, on people who stutter. They found too much dopamine activity in these people’s brains. That extra dopamine seems to stifle the activity of some of the brain regions that Chang and others have linked to stuttering.
If excess dopamine actually speeds up thought, that could more or less match what I experience. I have no idea if it would be experienced that way or not though.
I'd note that I would never seek treatment for this now with the stutter mostly gone. I consider my brain speed / speech speed a bit of a superpower or advantage in many ways and mitigating that as needed for specific scenarios is far more preferable to me than slowing down my brain to be limited to my "brain multitasking" speed limit.
Based on reading other posts here, it seems like fast thoughts tie back to a lot of people. I was lucky enough not to experience the nervous/anxiety part of it. I'm now wondering if that's an entirely separate experience, or simply an addition the mind can add on as one experiences stuttering.
My son (10) stutters. We thought we had gotten him help early enough so the problem would be "licked" just as so many others before him had done so but it helped some but the stuttering is still there. I don't know what else we could have done but this failure to help him cure his stuttering is one that left me feeling guilty and also angry (at no one in particular, just indiscriminate anger) and this spilled over into my marriage which is on its way to officially dissolving, sometime next year. Of course, it is a rich tapestry of reasons that has led my marriage's failure but the stuttering played its part.
Much respect for the honestly, introspection I can only imagine it takes to write that, and thank you for the perspective. I stutter and there have been discrete times I’ve noticed my mom being embarrassed, ashamed of me for it. She’s always been a great parent and really supportive, but to be honesty I can’t blame her: it must be frustrating seeing this develop and take hold in your child and not being able to beat it. It’s a seriously complicated thing, so while I thought man that’s really petty of you mom, at the same time I understood how she must feel. Anyway, brutal it ruined your marriage. Sorry to hear that. I have a newborn son and it’s really something watching to see if he will inherit this. I think if he does, that’s ok: there’s a lot worse you can inherit, a lot worse. That’s the thing about stuttering, it’s all in your head and you tend to blow it out of proportion which only makes it worse than it is or could be. I hope to come to terms with this stuttering to some extent, but don’t feel guilty or bad about yourself if you don’t completely.
I stutter too. It's was hard for both me and my parents. I know they always felt guilty, but it wasn't clear what they could have done differently. We tried therapy, and I think it was early enough too and it didn't make much of a difference initially. Please don't feel guilty. Thinking back, I think my stuttering got a bit better when my parents stopped correcting, or paying attention to it as much (at the advice of a therapist, I found out later).
Kids have a very good knack for picking the emotional state of their parents. They may not be able to articulate their feelings, but they can tell if the parent feels guilty, sad, angry, anxious. At least for me anxiety made it a bit worse. Try to find friends and family members who would be accepting and understand and maybe that would help some.
Forgive me if I sounded preachy or too direct, everyone is different of course, hope some of the advice helped. I wish you and your son all the best.
I think it is a wonder that a system as complex as speech does not have more externalized problems (I know there are others, but fewer than I'd expect given the number of systems speech and language touch).
Man, this article is super scary, accurate and hits too close to home.
It's the first time I've ever seen published a link between dopamine and stuttering.
As someone that has ADHD, and stutters - it's simply, wow. Just wow.
>risperidone, olanzapine and lurasidone.
>So Maguire wondered: could blocking dopamine be the answer? Conveniently, many antipsychotic drugs do just that. Over the years, Maguire has conducted small, successful clinical studies with these medications including risperidone, olanzapine and lurasidone. The result: “Your stuttering won’t completely go away, but we can treat it,” he says.
Interesting.
> Ecopipam
Well, a benzo, but I've never heard it before, but it makes total sense, it's ironic, but for me, it works 100% to make me focus, talk, think, be. Ritalin, caffeine, adderal works too, but, it's different.
Wow.
Using Etizolam, Ativan, Valium, works great, for me, wonders, and I don't really become "addicted" to it = there's an immediate threshold where it's effective to where I become tired and sleep. I've read stories about people who abuse them, and my tolerance never escapes the basics medicinal dose which makes it super interesting as well.
So much excitement, answers, questions, in something I just accepted and found natural remedies too over time thinking "oh it's anxiety." oh it's "just my ADHD" oh it's "just me becoming more introverted."
About 5 to 10% of kids, according to [0] begin to stutter temporarly. My little one started to stutter when she was 3 and after a few days nearly stopped talking altogether because she rather did not speak than stutter, to see this hurt badly. Before that she was actively communicating and joking with us. We felt like we lost a deep connection to her feelings, her emotions, like we lost her. I called a speech therapists and they told me that kids can start to stutter as they develop their language skills and they only start therapy if the stuttering goes on for more than a few months. We had some hard weeks while trying to follow the tips in [1] but luckily it went away. Seeing that she decided not to talk anymore, the effect that stuttering had on her, opened my eyes on what it might mean for someone who suffers from stuttering. All the best for everyone whose affected!
I have stuttered all my life. The best explanation to date I have studied and had the pleasure of being apart of is the Stuttering Valsalva Hypothesis. Look it up its a real eye opener and explains every aspect as to why stuttering happens in early childhood and for some persists into adult hood. Personally stuttering has forced me to live outside the box, to question life in a deep and meaningful way and to that extent it has been a blessing.
What’s the super power stutterers have to compensate? Usually when there’s a deficiency in one area other area step up and become stronger. Obviously it doesn’t have to be the case but I was hoping the article would mentions something about it.
I ask as a stutterer. :)
I open my mouth and sometimes the words just don’t come out. I can relax and think about what I want to say and it gets better. Or I choose a different word.
My vocabulary is very wide and I can decide, on the fly, to change one word for another, and that only as a response to avoid stuttering in certain words. As a result I am quite eloquent, and for this reason my colleagues often ask me to be the one to give lectures, talks, and that means that my work is better known in my area (I'm not the best contributor).
It's strange that because of my stuttering I'm now the master of ceremonies.
I speak multiple languages, as I found out I didn't stutter as much in some languages as I do in others. Granted, that's not why I learned them but it's just one of the side effects that it made learning them more enjoyable. "Hey, look I don't stutter in French, how about that... Let's speak some French then!".
Also, know lots of synonyms, just to avoid saying the dreaded stuttering words that I feel are coming up I substitute them at the last minute. Sometimes it works better than other times. You probably know exactly how that is :-)
A thick skin perhaps from all the bullying I had received. At least I'd like to think so. But, I do believe I am a bit more resilient and persistent because of it.
All of the comments about stuttering not occurring while singing and speaking other languages reminds me of this recent discussion about developing an alter ego to combat anxiety and boost confidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24197395
This seems to help overcome a similar psychological barrier.
Had a severe stutter as a child. It wasn't until I started meditating about 4 years back, that my stutter no longer holds me back.
My experience here lines up with the experience cited by others on the thread.
To phrase what seems to have worked for me in a more systematic manner -
A. Micro level - deep breathing helps. At the end of a long day, when I am fatigued, my words get slower and harder to get out clean. I take a deep breath or a series of breaths and this usually helps.
B. Marco - meditation really has helped me deal with my own thoughts and insecurities ( which unfortunately stuttering tends to push more of), and find a core of Calm. The more I reconnect with that sense of calm, the more I feel like stuttering is within my control, and the more it helps.
Wouldn't wish it upon anyone - many days ended with me cursing and hating myself. Many days I would blame my father for it (easier to blame him, as a young boy) for not doing anything about it.
I would certainly hug every little kid I see with a stutter. Not just for what they are going through then, but to just let them know that "it will be OK".
Just a personal experience: I remember stuttering as a kid, I was able to figure out that I stutter when I can't remember a word fast enough to say it, long story short I was able to train my self to stay silent until I remember the word I am about to say.
I think now it is not even noticeable.
I just noticed I am still doing this in the same way, a colleague just autocompleated my sentence. :)
[+] [-] lymeeducator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiblye|5 years ago|reply
As someone who sometimes has weeks of cluttered speech, and weeks where I'm perfectly fine, I'm now wondering if diet could be a contributing factor.
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|5 years ago|reply
It alters your diet so dramatically and greatly reduces the types of processed foods you can eat.
[+] [-] dmitryminkovsky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aluket|5 years ago|reply
I'd be intrigued to hear more about your theory
[+] [-] rootsudo|5 years ago|reply
My way of treating it, hat, has been successful was psychedelics.
Interesting.
[+] [-] anuragsoni|5 years ago|reply
I skipped classes to avoid doing that, i bombed many a presentation because I had trouble with certain sentences and it impacted my grades. I think not being able to make the best of time in grad school is something I can get over eventually, but a bigger regret I have is not being able to make meaningful connections with my peers in school because I'd avoid hanging out with people because of my anxiety over my stutter. In a way it almost feels like I never experienced
I still have issues with words starting with "A" which is unfortunate since my name starts with an A. I still speak really quickly which i think comes from a habit of trying to get through speech quickly to get it over with.
I do believe that a lot of it is mostly because of my anxiety as I speak just fine when i'm relaxed, and I've been trying to work on using different words when I feel like certain phrases/words will cause problems.
[+] [-] dmitryminkovsky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemvoltage|5 years ago|reply
Not sure if this would work for others, but this is how I see the world. It helps me battle stress.
[+] [-] jokull|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warent|5 years ago|reply
He developed his stutter years ago after a softball accident (hit him in the throat). He ended up getting into standup comedy and is becoming pretty big.
All this is to say that the "impediment" actually adds character to him and makes him a lot more interesting and memorable in good ways. Maybe you can reframe your stutter in this positive way as well.
[+] [-] Lvl999Noob|5 years ago|reply
I took speech therapy classes once, but unfortunately did not complete them. My stutter is still there but I can now at least reduce it a lot.
[+] [-] matthewheath|5 years ago|reply
I'm not entirely sure what helped me overcome the problem. If I'm relaxed, my speech is fluent. If I take deep breaths and think about what I'm going to say, the stutter rarely shows up. There are, of course, some words that I mispronounce still like "manipulative".
The only real ongoing issue is the learned habit of speaking quickly to try and overcome the stutter. Internally, I can understand exactly what I said, but externally it apparently comes out as a stream of unintelligible words. That's something I'm still working on.
The stutter comes back when I'm tired, nervous, or stressed. Apart from that, it's barely noticeable which I am pleased about.
How curious to know that it's all in the brain rather than a psychological cause such as anxiety which is what my parents used to assume. Perhaps I shall have to volunteer to help with future research.
[+] [-] gee_totes|5 years ago|reply
I have a stutter too and this was a very interesting article to add to my "head-canon" on why people stutter. My stutter is also affected by moods. Maybe we're living -- or rather, speaking -- on the edge of the brain-body connection.
[+] [-] smusamashah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azhu|5 years ago|reply
I'm not sure this model of thinking is fully correct. In a way, it's like saying that muscle cramps are all in the muscle rather than in their lack of hydration or their being overworked.
The substance of thought, emotion, and cognition is synapses firing, neurotransmitters transmitting, and neural connections being made. Like muscles, their movements flow as a result of environmental inputs, and environmental inputs that are stronger create stronger adaptations towards them.
The article doesn't say that it's all in the brain.
[+] [-] mandeepj|5 years ago|reply
Exactly like me. I can say any word, surprisingly in a better way, when I'm alone. I struggle primarily with words starting with T, D like Trajectory, Tutorial, and few more.
[+] [-] dmitryminkovsky|5 years ago|reply
Interesting how that works isn’t it?
[+] [-] secondcoming|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2wrist|5 years ago|reply
The interesting thing was that this required thought and awareness, which is a bit difficult when you are younger. As I got older my confidence came, so became more relaxed in company and therefore less tense and so likely to stutter. I still do on occasion, but I am less concerned about it these days.
[+] [-] biophysboy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msla|5 years ago|reply
Anyway, it's a "resetting" technique, forcing me to coordinate everything by holding things steady for a bare fraction of a second when they threaten to fall out of sync and cause a cascading failure. It wouldn't work without breathing, but breathing alone didn't quite do it for me.
(Interestingly, relaxing wasn't quite a necessity: I never stuttered when I yelled in anger.)
[+] [-] pbhowmic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HappySweeney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
People consider me articulate and eloquent.
When I'm not regulating I can still ramble until I'm out of breath. Never stuttering though. More like a mid-atlantic improv.
[+] [-] wyxuan|5 years ago|reply
I never thought of this problem as stuttering, but other people have brought this exact same commentary up to me.
[+] [-] therealx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mksha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrhektor|5 years ago|reply
Really happy about the progress being made in this field. Stuttering has been both a cause and result of my social anxiety, which people often mistake for aloofness or worse. Can't wait to try new therapies!
[+] [-] 2wrist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|5 years ago|reply
orig article: https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2020/new-neuro...
HN commentary from two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382722
[+] [-] iliaznk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adjkant|5 years ago|reply
For me, it was always the simple appearance that my mind was thinking far faster than I could talk, and that would get in the way the farther I thought ahead and could no longer "multitask" on the two "threads" coherently, forcing a bit of a reset. As I got older, I lost my stutter mostly but I speak quite fast. To the point that many of my friends have to get used to my speech when the see me for the first time in a while. I have to consciously tone down the speed for some public speaking events (which I generally handle well otherwise). This is something I honed mostly over middle/high school. In some ways, I solved this whole issue in reverse - speeding up my speech rather than slowing my thoughts, though of course there was a bit of meeting in the middle.
I wonder if this section might be relevant to my case:
> During the 1990s, Maguire and colleagues were among the first to use a certain kind of brain scan, positron emission tomography, on people who stutter. They found too much dopamine activity in these people’s brains. That extra dopamine seems to stifle the activity of some of the brain regions that Chang and others have linked to stuttering.
If excess dopamine actually speeds up thought, that could more or less match what I experience. I have no idea if it would be experienced that way or not though.
I'd note that I would never seek treatment for this now with the stutter mostly gone. I consider my brain speed / speech speed a bit of a superpower or advantage in many ways and mitigating that as needed for specific scenarios is far more preferable to me than slowing down my brain to be limited to my "brain multitasking" speed limit.
Based on reading other posts here, it seems like fast thoughts tie back to a lot of people. I was lucky enough not to experience the nervous/anxiety part of it. I'm now wondering if that's an entirely separate experience, or simply an addition the mind can add on as one experiences stuttering.
[+] [-] pbhowmic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitryminkovsky|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|5 years ago|reply
Kids have a very good knack for picking the emotional state of their parents. They may not be able to articulate their feelings, but they can tell if the parent feels guilty, sad, angry, anxious. At least for me anxiety made it a bit worse. Try to find friends and family members who would be accepting and understand and maybe that would help some.
Forgive me if I sounded preachy or too direct, everyone is different of course, hope some of the advice helped. I wish you and your son all the best.
[+] [-] oflannabhra|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootsudo|5 years ago|reply
It's the first time I've ever seen published a link between dopamine and stuttering.
As someone that has ADHD, and stutters - it's simply, wow. Just wow.
>risperidone, olanzapine and lurasidone.
>So Maguire wondered: could blocking dopamine be the answer? Conveniently, many antipsychotic drugs do just that. Over the years, Maguire has conducted small, successful clinical studies with these medications including risperidone, olanzapine and lurasidone. The result: “Your stuttering won’t completely go away, but we can treat it,” he says.
Interesting.
> Ecopipam
Well, a benzo, but I've never heard it before, but it makes total sense, it's ironic, but for me, it works 100% to make me focus, talk, think, be. Ritalin, caffeine, adderal works too, but, it's different.
Wow.
Using Etizolam, Ativan, Valium, works great, for me, wonders, and I don't really become "addicted" to it = there's an immediate threshold where it's effective to where I become tired and sleep. I've read stories about people who abuse them, and my tolerance never escapes the basics medicinal dose which makes it super interesting as well.
So much excitement, answers, questions, in something I just accepted and found natural remedies too over time thinking "oh it's anxiety." oh it's "just my ADHD" oh it's "just me becoming more introverted."
[+] [-] seedie|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/stuttering#who
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/going-beyond-intelli...
[+] [-] Mcai4sh3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wirthjason|5 years ago|reply
I ask as a stutterer. :) I open my mouth and sometimes the words just don’t come out. I can relax and think about what I want to say and it gets better. Or I choose a different word.
[+] [-] edgarvaldes|5 years ago|reply
It's strange that because of my stuttering I'm now the master of ceremonies.
[+] [-] rdtsc|5 years ago|reply
Also, know lots of synonyms, just to avoid saying the dreaded stuttering words that I feel are coming up I substitute them at the last minute. Sometimes it works better than other times. You probably know exactly how that is :-)
A thick skin perhaps from all the bullying I had received. At least I'd like to think so. But, I do believe I am a bit more resilient and persistent because of it.
[+] [-] shanecleveland|5 years ago|reply
This seems to help overcome a similar psychological barrier.
[+] [-] saisundar|5 years ago|reply
My experience here lines up with the experience cited by others on the thread.
To phrase what seems to have worked for me in a more systematic manner -
A. Micro level - deep breathing helps. At the end of a long day, when I am fatigued, my words get slower and harder to get out clean. I take a deep breath or a series of breaths and this usually helps.
B. Marco - meditation really has helped me deal with my own thoughts and insecurities ( which unfortunately stuttering tends to push more of), and find a core of Calm. The more I reconnect with that sense of calm, the more I feel like stuttering is within my control, and the more it helps.
Wouldn't wish it upon anyone - many days ended with me cursing and hating myself. Many days I would blame my father for it (easier to blame him, as a young boy) for not doing anything about it.
I would certainly hug every little kid I see with a stutter. Not just for what they are going through then, but to just let them know that "it will be OK".
[+] [-] brna|5 years ago|reply
I just noticed I am still doing this in the same way, a colleague just autocompleated my sentence. :)
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|5 years ago|reply