SPEECHEASY: THE MIRACLE CURE??

CIC: Completely in Canal Model

Speech management has been a continuous pursuit of mine since the third grade.  I’ve had many rounds of speech therapy over the course of my life up until as recently as a few years ago.  That’s twenty grueling years of trying to control and management my own voice!  About four years ago I heard about this miracle device called SpeechEasy and after I saw what it did for the person that was using for the first time on Good Morning America I thought I had found my miracle.  But at that time I was already in speech therapy and making some progress so I decided to finish the sessions and hoped that I would finally be able to get a handle on my speech; making further research into the device or any other therapy unnecessary.  After about 10 sessions with a speech therapist and some hard work I had made some significant improvement.  However as a few years passed I witnessed my fluency deteriorate with every word I spoke.  All of the progress I had made was undone and it felt like my speech was worst than it had ever been.  I was defeated and I wallowed in it for a lot longer than I should have accepting that my speech would never improve.  I’m not sure how SpeechEasy popped up on my radar again but it did and I had hope again. I also had some major obstacles in front of me; the predominate one being the cost.  I was shown a price list during the initial evaluation and I was floored.  The device cost as much as my car!!!!!  This was not a decision to be taken lightly, but after experiencing the effectiveness of the device and evaluating what I had to gain by having it I decided to go for it.

But let me go back and explain what the SpeechEasy is and how it works.  At an early age I noticed that when I spoke in unison with others, such as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, my stuttering was drastically diminished. That always puzzled and amazed me; I don’t why it didn’t occur to me to research it sooner.  Years later I found out that this is called the choral effect.  The secret of the SpeechEasy lies in this phenomenon.  The SpeechEasy resembles a hearing aid and one of its main components is a microphone that picks up the sound of the user’s voice feeding it back into the device.  The device then alters the pitch and frequency of the sound making the user think someone else is speaking in unison with them; there you have the choral effect only needing your own voice.  The SpeechEasy is quite a marvelous piece of technology and it took 7 months of persistence and research to finally lease the device.  The first 60 days is the trial period and if unsatisfied I would be able to get a full refund so I really had nothing to lose.  The speech pathologist really took the time to explain the realistic expectations of the device and the limitations taking away the guise of the miracle device.  I appreciated that honesty because it prepared me for what to expect when I received my SpeechEasy.  Once I got the device it really became clear that it's not a miracle cure; it is a tool to manage your speech and it requires a lot of hard work.  The tagline on the workbook I was given read “Where technology meets techniques” and it proved to be true.  In some cases using the device was effortless and in other situations it was a struggle.  Reading aloud and speaking one on one with another person in a quiet environment was not that much of issue but if the noise level got loud, the device was rendered useless since it amplifies all surrounding noises.  Sadly at the end of the 60 days I decided to return the device because I didn’t feel that range of use for the device for me was justified by the cost.  That's not to say the others won't be elated to pay $5,000 for this device and experience great results for a prolonged period of time, but it just feel I need to explore other options.

Despite the fact that the device didn’t completely meet my expectations, I still learned a lot from my time with the SpeechEasy.  I gained a new sense of hope for the improvement of my stuttering and I also realized that I’m in control  and I am not helpless against this impediment.  The techniques that I have learned over the years were also reinforced by this experience and I realized that they worked once so why can’t they work again.  Now I’m refocused on the tools and techniques that improved my fluency before and even trying some new approaches. I’ll talk more about that later.