For scientists, conditions such as stuttering can cause enough stress and social anxiety to impede academic achievement and career success, says Shahriar SheikhBahaei, chief of the Neuron-Glia Signaling and Circuits Unit at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
As a scientist and a clinician who stutter, we believe if we want to confront this long-ignored condition, we should start in our scientific and medical communities,” they wrote. “We urge scientists who stutter and clinicians who stutter in every career stage … to give more seminars and conference talks and serve as a role model to show others who are experiencing the same disorder so that becoming a scientist or a physician should not be impeded.”
Nature spoke to SheikhBahaei and two other researchers with speech disabilities about their experiences at conferences, and how colleagues can support them. One requested anonymity to prevent disclosure from interfering with future career opportunities.
I’ve been stuttering since I was about three, and I had a lot of speech therapy that just wasn’t good. After college, I went into finance. Then, in my twenties, I had this amazing experience at a 3-week intensive stuttering therapy programme at the American Institute for Stuttering (AIS) in New York City. There were components dedicated to working on cognitive-emotional aspects in addition to speech, motor and behavioural aspects. The therapy I received as a kid mostly focused on the latter. The former allowed me to accept myself as a person who stutters. Most helpful was meeting a whole bunch of other stutterers. Learning to talk openly about stuttering was something I started doing at the AIS.
After receiving my clinical degree, I worked for two years as a preschool-based pathologist. I worked on language-based learning disability, articulation disorders, stuttering, apraxia, autism and others. But I realized that researchers and clinicians didn’t know anything about stuttering. It’s one of the disorders that we probably know the least about in the field. That prompted me to go and get my PhD in 2011. I study the context-based intermittency with which stuttering occurs and the factors that drive variability, including social interaction and anticipation.
As a scientist, my experience has been pretty positive for the most part. I have really good colleagues and collaborators, with whom my stuttering never feels like a problem. One thing that has been challenging is dealing with the pathologizing that goes on in science. As an example, scientists refer to control groups in studies as healthy controls, which implies the stuttering group is not healthy. I don’t think people are intentionally trying to cause harm, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not offensive.
It would be super helpful if there was some way to request extra presentation time when people are submitting abstracts to conferences. It would certainly reduce the feelings of time pressure during talks for people who stutter, which would in turn positively affect the talks. My advice to people who feel as if they would benefit from extra time would be to take it if it is offered. I think some people might think they could be inconveniencing others. Normalizing it would go some way to helping people to be aware at conferences.
For me, I have an easier time speaking in front of groups, as opposed to one-on-one, because of the nature of the back and forth. It wasn’t always like that, and I was petrified to speak in public. I have been told on numerous occasions by well-intentioned colleagues that they’re impressed if I don’t stutter a lot during a talk. It implies that the stuttering is the primary focus rather than the content of the talk, and that fluency is good and stuttering is bad, which as professionals in the field isn’t a message that we want to be sending.
The kind of chit-chat that happens at a conference is so important. But when people are in a rush to go somewhere else, it can make it really challenging for a person who stutters to engage and get anything out of those interactions. What makes it tricky with stuttering is that, especially if there are other people around who are also talking, if you block [get stuck trying to get a word out] — especially if it’s a silent block — then someone else might just jump in. Then, if you finish what you were saying, it could appear as if you were interrupting. When I first started going to conferences, I found chatting much harder. What has helped me is to be really intentional. I just kind of forced myself to insert myself in situations at the risk of being almost annoying. But that was what I had to do in order to take part in these interactions.
If you’re a person who stutters, one of the most common reactions from people is this thing we call ‘the look’. It’s the moment when you stutter and the person you’re talking to isn’t sure what’s happening. The eyes sort of squint, and some people will lean in a little more and do all of these things that maybe they think are helping, but they are definitely not helping. It makes it much harder for the stutterer because it can be perceived as the person thinking you’re not smart. The right thing to do in one of those situations is just to wait for the person to say what they want to say. And honestly, this is a good communication skill for anybody to have, regardless of whether the person stutters or not. Just be present and listen.
ANONYMOUS: Be patient
Postdoctoral biologist on the US West Coast.
My brain sometimes decides it doesn’t really like language and takes a break. Sometimes it is just for a few seconds. Sometimes it is half a day or more. Sometimes I can’t find words. Other days, I’m not sure what my own name sounds like. It’s called transient aphasia — the primary symptom of an electrical neurological disorder. It’s completely unpredictable. If I get overly tired or stressed, it happens more frequently.
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