is therapy for everyone
Hi,
I am a second year graduate student, and also have the opportunity to work in the school setting working with students who receive speech services. I work with a particular student who has Prader Willi and as a result is working on articulation skills. During her last evaluation she was tested for fluency and was determined to be a moderate stutterer (SSI-4). The student and the parents have no concern about the stuttering and just ignore it. If there is no concern should it be a target area and addressed in therapy?
Thanks,
Kaylee
Kaylee,
It is interesting that you are working with a client who has Prader Willi Syndrome. I worked at the Rehabilitation Institute of Pittsburgh during my Clinical Fellowship Year and the first 5 years of my career. We ran a Prader Willi program the entire time I was there. I actually carried out a study (with a colleague named Lori Stambaugh) looking at the speech disfluency of about 20 Prader Willi clients ranging in age from 10 – 18 years. It has been many years, but as I recall, the speech disfluencies appeared to be related more to language formulation than motor issues. The disfluency types we saw were more similar to those found in other cognitively impaired individuals as compared to individuals who stutter with cognitive abilities WNL.
Similar to your client and her family, the speech disfluency was of less concern than other issues they were addressing. Since I draw my clinical goals from the goals of my clients, for those few clients who were bothered by their disfluencies, we addressed them.
If you client and her family are not concerned, do you think they will be motivated to change?
If there isn’t motivation, do you think they will succeed in making change?
If you were told to work on improving an area of yourself that you were not concerned about, when you had other issues to deal with (some life threatening), do you think you would invest much time addressing the goal of little concern?
Answer these questions, and I think you will have answered yours.
It sounds like you are getting some great clinical experiences as a 2nd year graduate student.
Thanks for your question.
Kevin Eldridge