Spasmodic Dysphonia
Spasmodic Dysphonia. That’s the speech impediment Dilbert creator Scott Adams suffered from for several years. An interview in Wired magazine describes Adams’ trials and tribulations. This is how the article describes spasmodic dysphonia as it occured in Adams:
[He'd] open his mouth to talk, only to find the words tumbling out in a raspy, imperceptible staccato, chopping off sentences before they had a chance to form. If he tried to say, “Tomorrow is my birthday,” for example, it would morph into a weak “Ma robf sss ma birfday.”
However, when speaking in front of an audience, giving a lecture, his speech is loud, fluid, and clear. Each type of situation–eating in a restaurant with friends, speaking on the phone, giving a speech–has its own mercurial set of rules.
To make a long story short, Adams was able to get an operation to fix the problem. Even though he was convinced he could solve the problem himself by using a pseudo-scientific approach to his speech, nothing he tried worked. A surgeon at UCLA performed “selective laryngeal adductor denervation-reinnervation,” which basically severs the nerve that is being told to spasm. Adams had to re-learn how to talk, but six months after the procedure his speech is nearly back to normal.
Adams’ experience is painfully familiar to me. As a stutterer, I too have my own rules and regulations: for some reason, phrases starting with an “s” or an “f” are difficult for me, so I try to avoid them and figure out a way around them. Calling some stranger for information on the phone is usually not a problem, but if it’s someone I actually know but am not particularly close to I have trouble. Giving a presentation with some PowerPoint slides is not a problem, but having to read a scripted speech or making a presentation without slides does not work. I try to parse the world around me into situations I know I can handle. Of course that’s all psychological, and of course it’s not much of a solution, but it works, and that’s enough for me.
I suppose stuttering has had its benefits. I worked on getting as large a vocabulary as possible so I can use words I know I can say in a particular situation. And I guess I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel like opening my mouth unless what’s going to come out is interesting and worthy of the effort I am going to have to expend to get it out there.
Nevertheless — if I could, I’d get an operation, like Adams did. I couldn’t care less if that’s considered copping out or giving up. Self-treatment of this thing simply doesn’t work. All I can do is mollify. I can’t ever actually fix it.