Treating Speech Impediments

Many people have speech impediments, and many children have trouble speaking when they are young. In a society that values eloquence, speaking with a noticeable difficulty can be embarrassing and cause serious self-esteem issues. It can also mean difficulty in getting a good job or progressing in life successfully. This shouldn’t be true, but sometimes is. Fortunately, speech impediments can be treated.

Most people first think of a speech tehrapist when looking for solutions to a speech impediment, and certainly a speech therapist can  help, but there are several options for treating speech impediments besides seeing a licensed speech therapist.

Courses, whether one-on-one or in groups, can be helpful in easing speech impediments. Because “treating” a speech impediment really involves training the muscles of the mouth, jaws and throat to work together differently, a personal course can be very effective in retraining these muscles. Group and individual courses, in person or via the Internet and/or phone, can be very useful for people who want to learn to speak more fluently.

Hypnosis can be helpful for people with speech impediments, again because it’s a matter of training the muscles and not “healing” a condition. Often stuttering and stammering, particularly, are caused by unconscious anxiety, and hypnosis can be very effective in eliminating this anxiety and helping the speaker to get the words out clearly.

Self-help DVDs and books also help many stutterers, in particular, correct their speech. While it may seem strange that “self-help” can help a speech impediment, it goes back once more to the idea that this is not a physical illness, but a habit of the muscles, that has developed wrong. It can be retrained, and books and DVDs can help with that.

Many people with speech impediments do see speech therapists, and this can be helpful. Particularly for kids or people who’ve had an injury that affected their speech, a trained therapist can help retrain speech very well. It’s important to know that speech therapy is one option, but it’s also important to know that there are other options if speech therapy does not work or is not available.

Treating a speech impediment is not at all like treating a physical illness, in many ways. In treating speech, the patient must become very involved and work at retraining the muscles. It’s more along the lines of recovering from an injury, than treating an illness.

When you research options for treating your speech impediment, take into account your personality and how you learn best. If you feel that working with a therapist or teacher one-on-one would work well for you, then speech therapy or an individual course may be best for you. If you work well in groups, try a group course. And if you’re very self-directed, then a DVD or self-help book might be the best way for you to learn to retrain your speech muscles.

Whatever method of training you decide on, the most important thing you can do is dedicate yourself to studying, practicing and developing correct speech patterns.