@tony@... Thank you for bringing the subject back to stuttering/stammering. As a lifelong stutterer, one of the biggest challenges has been people assuming/treating you as if you had a mental disorder or were mentally impaired. The cartoonist Scott Adams developed a neurological condition that affected his speech. He wrote about how he came to dread going out to eat (even though he owns a restaurant) because, as he bluntly put it, the moment he tried to speak his order he would be given the "retard look". People begin speaking very slowly to you (or loudly, for some reason) as if you were incapable of understanding multi-syllable words. I've had more than one person ask "What country are you from?" and "What's your native language?". An oblivious recruiter on a phone call told me that "There must be something wrong with our connection, because it sounds like there's long pauses between some of your words and some of them are repeated." That was so humiliating I remember getting off the call quickly then blocking the number on my phone just so I'd never have to speak to her again.
Our intelligence or sanity is not affected. We are NOT "nervous" and don't need to be told to relax or calm down. That's why you stutter, not us. We don't need to know about your friend's friend who used to stutter but then it went away; stutters that persist into adulthood have almost a zero percent chance of "cure" and there is no simple treatment or solution, merely ways of coping. Attempts to finish our words or sentences may be motivated out of sympathy, but generally make us feel inferior and are not desired. Stress makes the stuttering worse, and this often adds pressure on us to try to get out what we want to say before you say it for us, making the stuttering worse, increasing the stress, and a "death spiral" results.
How DO we want to be treated? As a teenager I attended a symposium on stuttering with a speech pathologist. There was a registration table and as it was finally my turn in line and I was asked my name, I began stuttering and couldn't do it. As it turns out, the man at the registration table was stuttering performer (!) Irving Burton. He looked me in the eye (don't get that too often), and told me "You see that line behind you? Many of those people stutter, and so do I. You just take all the time in the world you need, and I'll be here, even if it takes all night. I'm not going anywhere." That was probably 25 years ago, but it was still one of the most empowering moments of my life.
One other event, about 20 years ago, and a server at a cafeteria exhibited similar patience as I struggled out what I wanted to eat (at that point in my life, I'd often taken to pointing or choosing whatever was at hand just to avoid embarrassment). The server waited patiently and then told me that I had a beautiful voice, it was the extra time for her to hear it, and that I shouldn't be afraid to share it. Again, a very uplifting message at a very low point.
In short: patience and respect (eye contact rather than looking at one's watch or finishing our words) is what we hope for and reduces our dread of speaking immensely. This is quite the opposite of how the PM behaved.
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