17 Jul 2015
Stuttering Openly and Seeing What Happens at the FRIENDS Convention (Ep. 539)
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Grace McMahon, 16 years old, joins Peter Reitzes at the FRIENDS 18th annual convention in Raleigh, North Carolina. Grace is attending her 7th FRIENDS convention this summer. Ms. McMahon discusses tearing down the fears of stuttering, stuttering openly, speaking to her entire school about stuttering and her change from focussing on fluency all the time to working on stuttering openly and being happy with herself. Grace shares how both she and her parents have moved from wanting fluency to embracing that stuttering is okay. Grace has a brother who stutters and shared during this episode that “We both stuttering openly; it’s pretty great.”
17 Jul 2015
Support Stammering in India: Dhruv Gupta from the FRIENDS Convention (Ep. 540)
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Dhruv Gupta joins Peter Reitzes at the FRIENDS 18th annual convention in Raleigh, North Carolina and discusses how self help in India resembles the early days of self help in the United States. Mr. Gupta is asked about a crowdsourcing fundraiser he is spearheading titled Support Stammering in India. Dhruv describes this fundraiser as a “one-year focused intervention for people who stammer (PWS) in India of all ages to strengthen self-help groups, create & distribute self-help resources, organize workshops/conferences and enrich current therapeutic practices.”
This is the Indian link to the campaign. Dhruv mentioned this article, Running Self Help Groups/support groups which was adapted from a resource written by Michael Sugarman.
Dhruv Gupta is a sustainability advisor at cBalance, a volunteer with The Indian Stammering Association, and the founder of Speak: Stammering Foundation. Dhruv recently facilitated a two day FRIENDS workshop in India and has appeared a number of times on StutterTalk.
Peter Reitzes, MA, CCC-SLP is a person who stutters, President of StutterTalk, a school based speech-language pathologist and author of His Name is Peter Cottontail: My Story Passing as Fluent in the book Stuttering: Inspiring Stories and Professional Wisdom, published by StutterTalk.