This term refers to stuttering where onset appears suddenly, and later in life than DS (Baumgartner, 1999), and which can be related to, or associated with, a significant traumatic event, or events. van der Kolk, B. Psychogenic stuttering is a rare condition that appears to occur almost exclusively in individuals who have experienced severe emotional trauma or who have a history of psychiatric illness. This is called psychogenic stuttering. Your submission has been received! logical injury or disease as neurogenic stuttering, and the disorders often co-exist. In stuttering, the trauma actually is a "contemporary experience." Heite (2001), based on a survey of 108 stutterers, found that about two thirds of stutterers experience dissociation during some portion of the stuttering sequence. Since, in stuttering, the events that can provoke dissociation are both actual stuttering and the accumulation of many memories of stuttering moments, a parallel treatment would be to allow the stutterer to stutter openly and freely in a setting that is safe. The clinic is in a professional office complex known as “Dunwoody Place North.” It is located in a group of brick, Georgetown-style buildings. The stutterer, meeting alone with the therapist, is encouraged to let the stuttering show, to examine it closely, to talk about it with the therapist (and even "talk to it" as our new book describes), and to feel the emotions and sensations that are a part of the experience. The dissociation that stutterers experience seems to be similar to that experienced by nonstutterers with PTSD. The specific methods recommended by van der Kolk, van der Hart, and Marmar (1996) are "discussing these patients' experiences in a safe setting, and encouraging them to share personal reminders of the trauma with the therapist." van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth (1996) describe a gradual building up of the PTSD victim's ability to remember the trauma without hyperarousal, from a very small confrontation with one aspect of the memory to a more complete narrative description of the event as something that happened to them in the past. With PTSD, "Because of [the] timeless and unintegrated nature of traumatic memories, victims remain embedded in the trauma as a contemporary experience, instead of being able to accept it as something belonging to the past" (van der Kolk and McFarlane, 1996, p. 9). Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1 80, 439-445. A psychogenic speech disorder is a speech disturbance that is caused by underlying psychological processes. Psychogenic stuttering can occur as a result of somatization, chronic stress, conversion disorder, adjustment disorder, or post-traumatic stress (Roth et al., 1989). In most cases, the voice becomes quieter and softer, or … Acquired Stuttering in Adults Stuttering-like dysfluencies can develop in adults. Furthermore, since dissociation is a common part of PTSD as well as stuttering and we have no specific treatment for dissociation in stutterers, it should be useful to look closely at those aspects of treatment for PTSD that deal with dissociation. psychogenic stuttering, can be caused by emotional trauma or problems with thought or reasoning. Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body, and society. Starkweather, C.W., and Givens-Ackerman, J. In van der Kolk, B.A., McFarlane, A.C., and Weisaeth, L (Eds.) At this point, stutterers begin to organize their lives around their stuttering. Psychogenic Stuttering is..... Stuttering that develops after a prolonged period of stress or after a traumatic event. When social circumstances similar to those of previous stuttering experiences occur, the stutterer is hyperaroused -- i.e., strongly provoked to struggle in an effort not to stutter. However, in that article I am not making any claims abou… In stuttering therapy too, at least as we see it, the overall aim is to move stutterers from being haunted by their stuttering past and their accumulated interpretations of what that past may mean, to a place where they no longer interpret emotionally arousing stimuli as a necessary precursor to stuttering.