Does speech therapy work and is it worth pursuing? What can I expect and what are your experiences with speech therapy?
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Does speech therapy work and is it worth pursuing? What can I expect and what are your experiences with speech therapy? I'm 22. I've done some speech therapy here and there and sometimes it helped, other times it didn't. It's been 6 years since I last had it done. I'm definitely not the worst stutterer and I can control it in certain situations such as job interviews. However it's bad enough to have impact on my self esteem and social life quite alot. I don't make jokes, tell stories and all the other stuff. I try my best but I just come off as disfluent and like there's something wrong with me. I also severely lack charisma and social confidence and would consider myself soemwhat socially awkward and underdeveloped. One of the rare things that has happened to me is I've been able to say my name. Part of it was through techniques ive learnt in therapy and part of it on my own. So that's made me reconsider my stance of it being completely a lost and hopeless endeavor. I don't know where I'm at with this and if stuttering is really something that is completely incurable. I'm considering speech therapy again but I don't know how it works. I just don't know if any reasonable fluency is even possible. The general trend on this subreddit seems to be "it's incurable" and you should just accept it. I agree with this and i did stop caring 4-5 years back. But I also think fluency to a great degree might be possible and it does vary from person to person. I know it's really mentally strenuous mindset and it gave me alot of false hope and inevitable let downs once speech therapy failed. All the mental effort of looking at hundreds of techniques on YouTube and doing speech therapy was just too much of a drain. So that's something I'm trying to avoid as well. What do you guys think? Is it worth pursuing? I'd love to hear from adults who got really fluent, clients of speech therapists or speech therapists themselves who've seen improvements. TL:DR= Not sure if speech therapy works or not at 22 years old. I've seen very mixed results in the past with it and each time stutter came back however I saw some lasting improvements such as being able to say my own namr. Overall it's something really financially, time and mentally strenuous to pursue and also sucks when it fails. I would love to hear opinions of speech therapists and clients who successfully had it done at a later age.