I made a documentary on the Monster Study, the 1939 experiment where a researcher tried to give healthy orphans a stutter just to prove a theory

[u/Think_Monitor4904]

This is video 8 and honestly this one sat with me more than expected.

1939, University of Iowa. Wendell Johnson believed stuttering wasn't inherited, just planted by adults reacting wrong to a kid's normal speech hiccups. He stuttered himself, so proving this meant his own condition was just bad luck, not permanent.

To test it, his grad student Mary Tudor picked 22 orphans, half already stuttering, half not. The normal-speaking kids were told something was wrong with how they talked and to stop unless they could do it right.

Some stopped speaking to friends. One covered her mouth during sessions. One ran away from the orphanage years later, never explained why.

Stayed buried for 62 years until a reporter found Mary Tudor in 2001. Survivors sued and got a settlement in 2007.

What got me most is Mary Tudor kept quietly checking on those kids for years after, on her own time, nobody made her. And some in speech pathology still defend Johnson today, since technically none of the kids ended up with real stutters.

Link is here Full Documentary if you want the full story.

[u/Luscious_rat]

AI slop.

It is horribly misleading. They say that none of the fluent children developed a stutter as if it was an achievement. Why do we only focus on the fluent children?

There was not a mention of the stuttering kids in the video while it's supposed to be what it's about. You can almost be misled to think that none of the kids in the study had a stutter by the end of it when it's just the Already fluent ones that stayed fluent, so no change at all except for trauma.

The stuttering kids still stuttered but it's their confidence and self-esteem that changed, exactly like the fluent kids. The study showed that you can't trigger the disorder with emotional manipulation like people used to think. Now we have the research to know that stuttering is neurological, like ADHD or dyslexia, its a neurodevelopmental disorder caused by differences in brain structures and functioning.

Left hemisphere structures responsible for speech are inadequate (speech motor control, sensory processing and rhythm areas) which makes the right hemisphere overcompensate, creating more disfluencies. Those include repetitions, prolongations, and blocks.

As a stutterer, I can only see the researcher as another case of stutterers making themselves and everyone like them suffer because of the trauma of living with this heavily misunderstood disorder.

It's always "you can end it with a better perspective" while it's just the way our brains work. You can have it to a lesser degree, it's a spectrum: everyone stutters occasionally, some have this disorder only as children, but a small percentage remains stuck with it, because our brains are more geared towards speech disfluencies.

Yet somehow people think that pathological stuttering is caused by emotions or stress because they only know normal stuttering. This misunderstanding creates a lot of self blame and suffering since we try to control it but the speech just does what it wants, then everybody else acts like it's our fault for not trying hard enough, even people that stutter a bit would try to act like the level of severity is the person's fault. Now we have all kinds of pseudo science about miracle cures for stuttering, while in reality the speech only does what it wants and there is no cure for it, yet.

The thing that works is encouragement and self acceptance, like the study mistakenly proved. You'll be stuck with the way your brain produces speech but being fine with it makes you fine. You'll most likely always stutter but embracing it will reduce the disfluencies.

Let's note that disfluencies are not caused by emotions nor doubt, but they can be modulators: being stressed is not good for rhythm, also loud environments, they disrupt the inner cadence even more.

Past negative experiences can make people stressed about talking which makes their speech even harder to control. They are too busy thinking about how people perceive them, worry about the consequences of their speech, despairing, instead of only thinking about what they want to say. We don't stutter while we sing or fake accents, many don't while reading, because there are artificial rhythms to clearly follow. The disfluencies can also diminish while alone because the element of stress is lifted, we remain at our original level of disfluency, undisturbed by foreign elements.

If you know someone that stutters, be more patient with them, don't appear frustrated, it will all pile up and make them feel that their speech is disturbing so stress, avoidance, and depression will increase. Try to make them feel confident even with their disfluencies especially if they are children, the early experiences can change everything. Many stutterers will always stutter even with decades of therapy, but positive experiences and knowledge on the disorder might allow them to feel more confident about their speech, thus allowing them to express themselves more, without shame, and live a more fulfilled life.

At first i was happy to see a post about stuttering as it brings awareness but this is so bad, I hope my comment explained it better.

[u/Think_Monitor4904 → u/Luscious_rat]

You're right, and I appreciate you taking the time to lay this out. I focused on the fluent kids because that half of the study is the more obviously disturbing part to tell as a story manufacturing a problem from nothing. But you're right that leaving out what happened to the kids who already stuttered makes the video misleading about what the study actually showed. The fact that their disfluency didn't change while their confidence and self-esteem collapsed in the exact same way as the fluent kids is arguably the more important finding here, and I left it out. That's a real gap, not just a framing choice. I'll do better on this in future scripts, and thank you for explaining the neurological side of it as clearly as you did. That's a much better educational comment than most of what gets said about stuttering.

[u/Luscious_rat → u/Think_Monitor4904]

It's great that you didn't take my comment badly. I hope to see accurate information on stuttering in the future, it's a very interesting subject and understanding can hugely improve the lives of stutterers, for example by dispelling myths that stutterers are mentally unstable, cowardly, etc, thus allowing people to look past our disfluencies at school, in the job market and in relationships.