Hi, I’m Adam Black and I’m a person who stutters
Stammering Awareness Day is the 22nd of October
and it’s a really lovely opportunity to
talk about stuttering. Stuttering affects 1% of the world’s population
So that’s roughly 70 million people who stammer
It cuts through all social boundaries
all races, all ethnicities, all personalities, all job titles
If you stutter then you stutter
Stuttering is essentially a neurological condition and
it’s fibres in a part of the brain called the arcuate
fasciculus that don’t quite form the same as a fluent speaker
That mixed in with the manifestation of different
behaviours that you build up through your stuttering life
are what you see as a person who stutters
I thought today it would be nice to share a few stories
about people that I know who stammer
and things that have changed their life
For example, I know of one man when
he was 17 and he was thinking about university
He went to the bus station to buy his ticket and
he had really seen a course he was interested in at Leeds
and he really wanted to go to Leeds uni but
when he got to the checkout to buy his ticket he
could not say Leeds for anything.
The word would not come out. So he asked
for a ticket to Manchester jumped on the bus to Manchester and chose
a course there. The direction of his life
changed in a single second based on his stammering
I know another guy who qualified as a lawyer
Really academic, really bright
but when it came to speaking to clients
or indeed in court, he just couldn’t do it
His stammer beat him
So because of that his whole job career changed
and he started to work as a forklift driver
in a warehouse. Now he loved that job
his best friends were in that job and he
wouldn’t change it but it wasn’t what
he initially ever wanted to do. Again his stammer beat him.
That’s life changing for somebody. I suppose my last wee story
about stammering just to sort of raise a little bit
of humour around it this time. I knew a guy from Wales
who stammered and he was a policeman and he
tackled this suspect for whatever reason on a
street corner and the guy was resisting a little bit
so he radioed in for back up but when he
looked up to see what the street name was,
it was one that he couldn’t say,
one he knew he would stammer on so
he huckled the suspect and dragged him round
the corner a little bit until he could find a
street name that he could say. He didn’t want to do that
but he felt his stammer gave him no choice
So for International Stammering Awareness day today
if you know anyone who stammers
talk to them about it, ask them their story
Thank you