Jeff Blitz. Link to full interview...

'Rocket Science' tells the story of Hal, a stammering teenager who joins the debate team in pursuit of a girl. BSA Scotland's Jan Anderson interviewed the film's director Jeff Blitz about his own experience of stammering.

My earliest speaking experiences were stuttered. My father stuttered and his approach had always been to accept himself as a stutterer. But I was obsessed with avoiding stuttering. As a result, I developed a tremendous vocabulary. My father doesn't care what anyone thinks about him. I wanted to be a really social kid and at 12-14 you just want to blend in.

When I was 15, I decided I wasn't content to be shy about whether to speak in public. I would have these great arguments that would bloom in my head and I wanted to share them. So, I joined my debating team. In the first year I was tragically bad and my stuttering had never been worse. But in public speaking you develop a theatrical voice that is not your own and the more comfortable I became with this new voice, the less I stuttered. By the time I was in my last year of high school, I was amazingly good at debate. I was almost completely fluent and it carried over into my life outside as well. I didn't have anxiety about stuttering anymore.

JA: The film is about a lot more than stuttering. If there is a core message to the public or to people who stutter, what might that be? JB: Essentially, I feel like everybody stutters - it's just that some of us do it with words, while others do it in different ways. Everyone has their own thing that they believe ought to be simple, but they find it's not simple at all. And people feel a great deal of shame about that. I think that if everyone were aware of their own weaknesses, or their own areas where they couldn't achieve what they wanted, we'd find that includes everyone in the world. So, stuttering was really a metaphor for a lack of mastery over the world that everybody feels in one realm or another.

I went through a period of incredible fluency during which I would tell people 'I am a stutterer', and they would say 'that's absurd, you are perfectly fluent'. I still experienced the mental exertion that goes into not stuttering. I still had to think through my sentences. I was good at it, but they didn't just pop out.

Then I started to direct in the advertising world and telephone conference calls became how I would get a job. Suddenly, I became very self-conscious on the phone. Whatever my brain had been doing that had enabled me to be fluent, I lost the ability to do. I could hardly say anything, not only on commercial teleconference calls, but also on calls to family or friends.

I did some speech therapy that involved breaking a sentence down into chunks before you say it. Somehow breaking things down and thinking things through helped. What helped a lot.... I asked if there was anything that I could try drugwise for stuttering that I didn't need to be on all the time. I learned about a drug that had tested quite well, but there were some side effects. So, I went on Zyprexa for a while. It made an enormous difference but the side effects are unfortunate. You can put on weight. If you don't get 10 hours of sleep.... it's bad! I wasn't happy about the side effects but I took it long enough for the situations that were really difficult, like high-stress phone calls, to get easier. I went from being hardly fluent at all to being almost entirely fluent in just a couple of weeks. I will try out Pagoclone because it supposedly has fewer side effects. It's not for everybody and, as with any drug, you do not know the long-term consequences. However, if used cautiously, I believe they can make a tremendous difference.

True to the American character, if you can find the 'magic bullet' solution, you go for it. So, for example, in America people are also using the SpeechEasy device. I tried it but it gave me a headache. It didn't work at all for me, but I know stutterers for whom the difference has been magnificent. I think the big trend in the US, and probably ultimately around the world, will be the 'psycho-pharmacological' treatment of stuttering.

For much more on Jeff's journey with stammering, read the full interview at www.stammering.org/blitz.html

Note: Drugs can have severe side-effects. At present there is no medication available in the UK that can be prescribed specifically to help with stammering. For information on pharmacological treatment for stammering, go to: www.stammering.org/adther_drugs.html

From the Spring 2008 issue of 'Speaking Out', page 12