This is what helped me with my stuttering

This is what helped me with my stuttering I've stuttered since I was a child and it's continued throughout my life. It's debilitating, but more so as an adult. I've never been to any doctor or speech therapist to treat my stuttering; it's just something I've always tried to hide. **I'm not a doctor or medical professional**. I'm sharing my story because I'm just hoping this information will help others ... because it's helped me tremendously. I've shared this story a few years ago but I deleted it because I felt embarrassed to have it in my reddit history and it's always been a disability that I try to hide. For the past 19 years or so, I've been taking 5-htp and it's reduced my stuttering by about 99% on good days and 75% on bad days. I still get stuck on some words, specifically vowels and saying my name, but weird thing is that it doesn't happen all the time. 5-htp is not going to work for everyone and it has side effects, but it's truly changed my life. I started taking 5-htp because I also have mild-moderate depression, depending on the stressors in my life. I didn't make the connection at first but slowly noticed that my stuttering noticeably decreased or completely went away. It took trial and error to figure out what dose worked for my depression and stuttering. Back then, probably around 2006, I started to do more research on the internet on why 5-htp reduced my stuttering. I didn't find alot of information, but I ran into some minor comment mentioning dopamine as a possible culprit. In short, excess dopamine in the brain causes *some* people to stutter. 5-htp decreases dopamine (because it increases serotonin). From my understanding, serotonin and dopamine work oppositely in a balance; when one increases, the other decreases). That's when everything clicked for me. It made so much sense ... I probably have high levels of dopamine and low levels of serotonin which also causes depression ... which is what I have. (This is just my personal assessment. It might not be the same with everyone.) Fast forward to today, I found a 2021 research paper on stuttering (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8423914/) where it mentions increased dopamine and other chemicals as primary causes of stuttering, among other causes. This article is focused more on drug-induced stuttering, but it opened my mind on chemicals in my body that could be causing my stuttering. The research paper also mentions excess glutamate (or low GABA) as a possible cause of stuttering, so I'm going to try out another supplement to see if it helps with my stuttering.