Articles

Nina Reardon - Issue 22, Winter 2004
by Liz O'Connell, Team Leader, Yorkhill Paediatric Dysfluency Team
Nina Reardon is a specialist speech pathologist from Illinois, USA. She recently visited Scotland to accompany her partner Lee Reeves, Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Stuttering Association of America, who was keynote speaker at the 10th BSA national conference in Stirling. As a well-known specialist in the field of stuttering in the USA, Nina offered to present a workshop on Bullying and Teasing as part of the children and families programme at the conference. She gave an excellent workshop that was appreciated by parents, children and SLTs alike. She also helped facilitate other workshops for children and engaged in all the cut and thrust discussions that take place between participating therapists during conference. She was a valuable asset, source of encouragement and inspiration and a great person to be around that memorable weekend!

LO’C: Tell me about your work in America. Do you work with both children and adults who stammer? And is it only stammering clients you work with?

NR: I work in schools and in private practice. I think I have the best mixture ever! I also train clinicians, part-time, to become better equipped to handle stammering. In schools I do everything, like everyone else. In private practice 96% of my clients are children and adolescents who stutter. I don¹t work with any adults.

LO’C: Do you practice in a clinic setting or a centre?

NR: I have a couple of different placements. Right now I¹m working from my home but as soon as I get back (to the USA) I¹ll be opening up another office in a town near me. So many of my clients have to travel to see me. I’m in a fairly rural, small town area and some families travel up to two hours once a week just one way to come for specialist therapy. So, I have found a lovely colleague who is going to rent me a space once a week, starting September 2004.

LO’ C: What kind of treatments do you offer?

NR: I think it¹s similar to the therapy offered in the UK. The therapy differs according to age groups. With pre-schoolers I do a very indirect type of therapy and work with the parents, helping them find a more relaxed communication style within their home. So, I do work with children but pre-schoolers are mostly in the room to demonstrate to parents the different ways of communicating. I will move to more direct therapy as warranted. I tend to err on the side of indirect therapy for pre-school children.

LO’C: Do you work mainly on your own? Are you able to run any groups?

NR: With school-aged children I try to have as many groups as I can.

LO’C: Is that only in your private practice?

NR: No, both. In schools I try to pair children who stutter. They all get at least one individual therapy session a week because you have to be able to talk about things that they might not want to talk about in a group or with their peers. But they are grouped especially if I¹m lucky enough to have a group of kids who stutter who are the same age. Otherwise, I may have to group a child who stutters with other kids who are in a language group. I know the power of support of knowing that you are not the only kid and sharing ideas. In private practice I try to do the same thing. Once a month or so, if there are two children who are on the same path, I bring them together andwe have a little group. In the past I¹ve maybe had up to four or five kids in a group.

LO’C: Do you cover a small or large area? You sound as though you are very lucky to have a number of children who stutter in the same school. In Glasgow, it’s not easy to group children by schools our service isn’t lucky enough to have children in the same school. They are more spread out across the city.

NR: Actually, I cover quite a small area. We have a school that we call a primary school that runs from kindergarten right through to eighth grade (which doesn¹t often happen in the States). My school is actually in the middle of a cornfield. It¹s for all the country kids and kids from the subdivisions that are kind of out of town. There are about 300 children in the whole school. Sometimes there aren¹t two kids who stutter in the same school. I also have a high school in a different town and then I have what we call an alternative school which is for behaviourally disordered children who cannot be accepted back into their own schools until they deal with their issues. That’s been an eye-opening experience. Sometimes, when there’s only one child who stutters in a school, we collaborate with other therapists and try to get together with the children on a social basis after school. The parents bring their child in and we just arrange whatever we can, for example, we just go for a coke at McDonalds. Other therapists who travel between schools often cannot get a group together and so this seems the easiest way.

LO’C: Do you enjoy what you do because it sounds as though your job is quite varied?

NR: I never get bored. I have to keep up with general practice too. It would be easy, when you become a specialist, to be a one-trick pony where stuttering is all you ever do and all you’ve ever read. For a while I was like that because I was so immersed in stuttering. It was the only thing I wanted to read about and talk about. However, the pendulum kind of swings because I’m also a general practitioner now. I¹ll always stay in schools it keeps you grounded, knowing what can realistically be achieved in a school setting. The things I do in private practice may not always be readily available to me in school, but the fun part is that the things I do in school aren¹t readily available to me in private practice either. So there are good things about both settings. The training that I do is just one of my favourite things travelling about the country and talking about stuttering; raising awareness and watching a clinician become empowered and keen to treat a child.

LO’C: We have a Specialist Dysfluency Team in Glasgow what are your views on having specialist clinicians to treat people/children who stammer?

NR: The stuttering specialism was the very first specialty in the USA. We paved the way. I¹m not sure we have any other specialties yet, or ones that are recognised perhaps we are the only ones. The stuttering clinicians were the pavers yet we got hit with the reality that there are only 300 of us in the entire USA. We can¹t treat every child who stutters so obviously it can¹t be an exclusive group it has to be an inclusive group so we have now developed specialist mentors. I¹m a mentor so I would take a young clinician who wanted to become a specialist clinician and mentor that person to be board recognised, thus growing the specialist group. However, we know this group will never be large enough to serve every child who stutters in the USA. Our other roles are to lobby for greater training at University level and to provide continuing education afterwards because otherwise stuttering kids are always going to fall through the cracks.

LO’C: The National Stuttering Foundation sounds like a similar organization to the BSA do its members consist of a mixture of therapists, people who stutter, parents of children who stutter etc?

NR: Absolutely. It’s much the same. Speech pathologists have been particularly welcomed over the past few years. We are there to learn from each other and to educate and work with consumers to raise the level of awareness of the general public. Like here, stuttering or stammering is a misunderstood disorder. People cast off what they don¹t understand.

LO’C: Tell me about The Lidcombe programme in the USA.

NR: It has recently become more prevalent. There’s training going on and more talk about it at our conferences, such as ASHA. It hasn’t trickled to every part of the USA, of course, because it’s a big continent but learning more about it is becoming more important.

LO’C: Have you done the training?

NR: I have not done the training yet but I¹m anxious to do it.

LO’C: I was one of the first group of UK therapists to be trained in 1997. Sue O¹Brien came over from Australia to do the training. Initially the programme wasn’t openly accepted but once therapists had some experience behind them the reception became more positive. I¹ve been quite open minded about it and have seen some good results but would not recommend it for everybody. I definitely think the training makes you more confident. I see it as another therapy tool.

NR: Nothing works for everyone but it seems this therapy has proven that it works for some people. An important part of being a broad based clinician is to know what’s out there and if one approach is not working it¹s important you have an alternative. I’m a believer in pulling components of different things together. I¹m very eclectic and pull from all different areas.

LO’C: That sounds familiar! Thank you for agreeing to share your work with readers of signal alas our time has run out.

Liz and Nina had to finish their interview at this point as both had to rush to another workshop at the National Conference!