Wrestling Words

In a society where oral fluency is considered a mandatory life skill, such a radical notion strikes many as heresy. And, in fact, the vast majority of people who stutter remain committed to overcoming their problem. Many speech-disorder experts, too, find it difficult to fathom how anyone would willingly go through life wrestling with their words. "I wonder if those people who feel there is no need for professional help or a cure one day have the same feeling about any other disease -- cancer, for example," says Ehud Yairi, a professor of speech and hearing science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Would they say, 'Let's just learn to live with it?'"

In many cases, the answer is "Yes." Self-acceptance is a growing movement these days. From the deaf to the obese, people with physical differences are asserting themselves in new ways, challenging the conventional wisdom that they have defects requiring correction and sympathy "It's like everybody's saying, 'If you don't like me, fuck you,'" says Lowell Handler, whose book and film Twitch and Shout chronicle the lives of people with Tourette's syndrome, including himself. "For so many years, what happened was the opposite -- everybody had to fit the mold of the Midwestern, all-American, go-to-work-at-9-and-come-back-at-6-type person. People are finally saying, 'This is the way I am. I don't want to fix myself to suit everybody else.'"

Stutterers who subscribe to the idea of self-acceptance, as well as speech pathologists who have aligned themselves with the movement, point out that unlike cancer, which is a deadly yet treatable and often curable disease, stuttering is a physical impediment for which little can be done. In fact, fluency remains a pipe dream for most stutterers, despite all the touted remedies. "When I think of successful outcomes, I don't even think of words like 'stutter' or 'fluent,'" says Stephen Hood, a professor of speech pathology and audiology at the University of South Alabama. "I think of being a good communicator -- someone who can talk to anyone at anytime, with minimal negative emotion."

Stuttering afflicts about 2 million adult Americans, and four-fifths of them are men. It also tends to run in families, which suggests a genetic link. The incidence is higher in children, though most seem to recover spontaneously for reasons scientists don't understand. For some, stuttering means an intense and visible struggle to force individual syllables through their lips, a phenomenon that is physically exhausting for the speaker and mentally awkward for the listener. Others stutter mildly, occasionally getting stuck or tripping on sounds. Some manage to avoid outward symptoms by substituting words and feigning ignorance. "They can be so good at avoidance that their coworkers and even their spouses or family don't know that the person stutters," writes Thomas David Kehoe, author of Stuttering: Science, Therapy & Practice. "Even though their speech sounds fine, these 'covert' stutterers can be crippled by severe psychological fear and anxiety."

Accompanying the speech problems are often a whole host of "secondary" behaviors that the stutterer has developed as gimmicks to force out the words. Ward Harkavy, a 51-year-old newspaper editor in Denver, recalls that for years he shut his office door every time he had to make a telephone call. "I had to pound on my leg to get the sound out," he says. A secondary behavior might help temporarily, but eventually it stops working; then the stutterer is stuck with one more socially inappropriate symptom.

Though stuttering is believed to be primarily a physical phenomenon, the stigma attached to it creates a whole array of psychological problems. Every person who grows up with the impediment knows what it's like to feel defective, to break a parent's heart, to have trouble navigating the social milieu of the schoolyard.