ABSTRACT

Patients with stuttering often encounter embarrassing, disappointing, prohibitive and often traumatic negative life events leading to speech problems since childhood period. It is widely accepted that traumatic life events cause dissociative experiences. In this study it was aimed to investigate traumatic life events and dissociative experiences of young adult patients with stuttering. Twenty eight male patients at a mean age of 20.8 years (between 19 to 22) with chronic and persistent developmental stuttering and 43 healthy men at a mean age of 20.6 years (between 19 to 22) with similar demographics were included in the study. Dissociative Experiences Scale and the Trauma History Test were administered to all subjects. In contrast to our expectations, dissociative experiences in the cases of stuttering did not differ from the control group. However, the incidence of experiencing a general disaster or trauma in stuttering cases was higher than that of not experiencing these events. These results show that patients with stuttering have dissociative experiences with a severity similar to those of healthy individuals.