Today article is devoted to such important psychological problem as a stutter. Yes, yes, that’s just stuttering is a psychological problem. The fish rots from the head, says the proverb, and it’s quite true. Apparently all of our problems, in particular disease, go to our heads and do nothing. Even if someone is a brick falls on your head, it is also the head, because the brick to anyone on the head will not fall.

But back to the stuttering, stuttering – a psychological problem, the cause of which lies somewhere in the depths of our psyche. What do we know about this disease? Why stammering is manifested in some people, but others have never encountered this problem?

The problem of stuttering is as old as human civilization. We know that some of the muddled Egyptian Pharaohs, Moses stuttered great (he did not even try to fight it) and the famous Greek orator Demosthenes. The latter was quite an effort to defeat stuttering. For this purpose he used such exercises as interesting talk with a mouth full of pebbles, declaring complex texts to the sound of ocean waves and seclusion in a dark cave to listen to the silence. In fact, he invented the first psychological training to deal with stuttering. What he came up with if it true in our time, because people who were at the time of Demosthenes are there now, well, except at the time did not have computers with Internet and mobile phones, and instead of cars used chariots. Because the cause of stuttering lies in the depths of human psychology, and to get rid of it, we had a considerable effort, willpower and patience.

Physicians ancient and medieval thought stuttering very strange disease, because for a long time could not manage to establish the cause of stuttering and to answer the question why some people have it and others do not. Sometimes practiced are not very humane methods of treating this disease, because the Roman physician Celsus Cornelius, those who stutter, cut language. So did the German surgeon Johann Friedrich Difenbah, who lived in the 19th century. He cut some the muscles of the tongue, and for many people it did give its effect. But not to all. At one time he was very popular and many people with stuttering disease with joy went at this operation. The problem was something else, after a certain time, the people who cut the tongues, stutter came back. The numbers of dissatisfied patients were growing and at the end of this treatment had to be abandoned altogether and became finally clear that the cause of stuttering is not in the muscles of the tongue.

The first adequate response on the causes of stuttering gave Russian psychiatrist Ivan A. Sikorsky, which linked with stuttering feature the human nervous system and heredity, and said that stuttering is a neurosis. In the 20th century for stuttering took seriously, and there was a whole branch of medicine – speech therapy.

Causes of stuttering may be many and they all occur in early childhood, up to 5 years, when the mind is being formed. It may be trite and fear, scandal in the family, and other negative emotions and feelings, trying to imitate a child to some family member who also stutters. It is also a frequent cause of stuttering is such a thing when someone is left-handed, and his attempt to forcibly retrain for right-handers. (I think that this should not be in any case, as teachers and parents who are doing such barbarism with children, we must carefully straighten brains)

Boys suffer from stuttering to four times more often than girls.

Modern speech therapy has in its arsenal are many methods to combat the disease, it’s the same conversation with the balls in your mouth (the method of Demosthenes), pronunciation of tongue twisters, singing (a very effective method for people with stuttering is very useful to sing).

I also have an opinion how to fight against this problem. Write about it in the next article.