Joe Biden: A candidate who happens to stutter
Thank you, Joe Biden, for having the personal guts and the compassion for others regarding publicly revealing your common disability. It will go a long way to leveling the presidential election playing field concerning innuendos of cognitive decline. But it will, more importantly, aid the entire stuttering community.
“Whenever he (Joe Biden) does talk, he can’t put two sentences together. The man can’t speak. He is not mentally sharp enough to be president” — Donald J. Trump
Initially I had penned a piece for The Day begging presidential candidate Joe Biden to come clean regarding what was then a “closet” problem — stuttering. I had actually sent a draft to Biden’s campaign requesting their blessing on printing the potential Op-Ed article and asking them to run it up the chain of command to the top. On the last night of the Democratic National Convention, Brayden Harrington, a 13-year-old boy from New Hampshire, summoned the courage to speak to the convention and the nation about something that united him and the candidate, whom he had met — the same issue, stuttering.
I have a friend, Danette Fitzgerald, who stutters. And her friend, Charles Repine, stutters also. Charles is a technical writer for the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, and both he and Danette are members of the National Stuttering Association. Charles recently posted a fantastic Facebook piece on this neurologic diagnosis in light of the recent attacks on Biden, attacks accusing him of everything from MCI (mild cognitive impairment) to frank Alzheimer’s disease. Some pertinent information from Charles follows which I, as a board certified internist/ geriatrician, was embarrassingly unaware of.
People who stutter have problems with what are called “content words”— the most important words of a sentence, such as names, numbers, etc. For these individuals the terms then become feared — words they know they cannot consistently annunciate. This leads to two types of behaviors. The first is avoidance, or just not speaking the word. The second is escape, once trapped into expressing a word, the person who stutters abruptly stops his or her thought or changes its trajectory. And what do those behaviors appear to be to someone listening to the speaker? A lapse in memory or even early dementia.
To the stuttering community, Joe Biden tends to demonstrate both behaviors. As Charles explains, take the sentence, “I need to go to the grocery store to buy some milk” with the high content word being grocery. “Circumlocution,” or speaking around a word to avoid it, has the sentence come out, “What I need to do is, hop in my vehicle and drive to the place, where they sell food, and purchase some things for breakfast.” “Postponement,” or putting off the feared word, can take the form of “filler words” — “I need to, uh, go to the, uh, you know, grocery store, and uh, buy some, uh, you, know, milk.” Escape can take the form of “sentence abandonment” — “I need to go to the gro---, ah, nevermind, you don’t want to hear about it.” And some stutterers combine techniques — “I, uh, need to go to the, you know, gr---super market, to, to purchase some … things we might need for breakfast, maybe like milk.”
Do the above renditions sound like impending dementia? You’re darn tootin’. As a geriatrician, if I hear a patient speaking in this manner, they have Alzheimer’s until proven otherwise. I again quote Charles Repine: “A simple declarative sentence can quickly unravel into an inefficient barely intelligible mess. I was able to watch several consecutive minutes of him (Biden) speaking. And good grief — in my unprofessional opinion, he has avoidance behaviors all over the place. To make things worse, it appears he may not be able to say both “Obama,” thus, substituting “the guy I worked for” or “the last one,” and “Trump,” using “the president, the current president.”
Thank you, Joe Biden, for having the personal guts and the compassion for others regarding publicly revealing your common disability. It will go a long way to leveling the presidential election playing field concerning innuendos of cognitive decline. But it will, more importantly, aid the entire stuttering community, including kids like Brayden Harrington. And from now on out, you will not be characterized as demented Uncle Joe, who is trying to claim the highest office in the land. You will be Joe Biden, a candidate for president who happens to stutter.