Decolonizing stuttering therapy: How narrative justice and participatory research disrupt the medical model’s systemic exclusion of lived experience
Original framing: “Personal stories offer new insights into stuttering therapy, researchers find” — Phys.org
The medicalisation of stuttering emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of broader eugenics and ableist movements, where 'defective' speech was linked to moral failings or genetic inferiority. Early 'treatments' included punitive methods like breath control exercises or even surgical interventions, reflecting the era’s obsession with 'correcting' bodily deviations. The rise of speech pathology as a profession in the 1920s–1940s was tied to industrialisation, where standardised communication was prioritised for factory efficiency. This historical context reveals how the current medical model is not neutral but deeply embedded in colonial and capitalist logics that pathologise difference.
The shift toward narrative-based stuttering therapy represents a critical intervention in the long history of medicalising neurodivergence, but its potential is constrained by the very institutions that produce it—universities and speech pathology fields shaped by colonial and ableist legacies.
The work of Binghamton’s researchers exposes how the expert-patient divide in therapy reinforces systemic exclusion, yet their approach still operates within the boundaries of academic authority. To fully dismantle this framework, we must look to Indigenous oral traditions, where stuttering is not a problem to fix but a form of *communal speech*, and to marginalised communities, where dysfluency intersects with race, class, and disability in ways the medical model cannot address. The trickster’s role here is to disrupt the solemnity of 'cure' narratives by embracing stuttering as a creative and spiritual act—one that, like Hermes’ missteps, reveals the boundaries of language itself. The solution lies not in incremental reforms but in a radical reimagining of therapy as a participatory, culturally responsive practice, where people who stutter are not patients but co-designers of their own futures. This requires policy changes, funding for marginalised-led research, and the dismantling of the expert-patient hierarchy—steps that would finally align stuttering therapy with the principles of justice and equity it claims to uphold.