No Role Models?

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon on the internet and elsewhere…one that ultimately prompted me to start my own blog on stuttering: There are very little community resources online for stutterers. You can find blog after blog on alcoholism…on drug addiction…gambling addiction. But few on stuttering. You can find many Yahoo Groups on all kinds of disabilities and afflictions…but few on stuttering.

Even on the boards I did find, there were few participants and most of the messages were very few and far between, even years in some cases. In short, there seems to be very few communities online for people wanting to meet and talk to other stutterers. I wonder why this is?

Could it be that most stutterers don’t like to talk about their affliction? Could it be that many of the world’s stutterers are closeted and don’t really want to deal with it? Might there be many stutterers who fool themselves into believing they are not actually stutterers and they just mostly ignore the problem? I suppose their could be any number of reasons.

Even more strange, some stuttering sites give you a list of famous people who are or were stutterers: James Earl Jones, Carly Simon, Mel Tillis, etc…but where are the endorsements by these celebrities? Where is the support? Every day you hear about some celebrity in Hollywood or some politician in Washington who has either “come out of the closet” as a gay individual…or who is coming clean about their prescription or illegal drug/alcohol problem. Yet, despite all the celebrities we know who either stutter now or once struggled with it…none come out in the open to help other stutterers or to at least give the stuttering community a focal point…someone to look up to besides Porky Pig.

James Earl Jones apparently had a very debilitating stutter most of his childhood…but then through some wonderful procedure, either on his own or through a doctor, he was able to overcome it and wind up in Hollywood with a successful film and voice-over career. Hey, James, mind telling us what you did? I’m sure Mel Tillis would like to know, at least!

How many times have you seen a television film about stuttering? How many times has Oprah or Ellen Degeneres featured guests who were stutterers in order to educate the general public about stuttering? Which 60 Minutes episode feature stuttering? When did Mike Wallace say anything about stuttering? Where is the Dateline coverage of the phenomenon of stuttering? Have you ever seen any show or documentary or feature on the phenomenon of stuttering? I haven’t.

55 million people in the world stutter. And some of them stutter so badly, they can barely navigate a few sentences…much less hold a conversation of reasonable length. It’s one of the most mysterious and frustrating afflictions one can face…yet we hear almost zero about it except in thin books down dark aisles in the library or obscure websites on the internet. I hope all of this will change eventually.