A Patient’s Journey: From Stuttering to Advocacy—and What Psychiatrists Need to Know

CONFERENCE REPORTER

At the American Professional Society of ADHD and Related Disorders (APSARD) 2026 Annual Conference a conversation between a clinician and his former patient underscored the clinical and educational gaps surrounding stuttering and its treatment, particularly for psychiatrists who may encounter these patients without formal training in the condition.

After more than a decade of treatment, Zach described taking an unusually active role in his own care. “I was trying to be as educated as a patient as I could,” he said. “And that involved reading as many research papers as I possibly could on stuttering.” That search led him to research that felt transformative. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen before,” Zach said. “It was so exciting to find someone who’s really making inroads on how to treat.”

Their relationship began with a long in-person discussion with Gerald A. Maguire, MD. Maguire, director of residency training and chair of psychiatry at College Medical Center in Long Beach, California, founded the Stuttering Treatment and Research Society (STARS), a nonprofit organization dedicated to “advancing neuroscience research and therapies to better the lives of people who stutter.”

“I called you up and I drove to your office in Costa Mesa and we talked for hours,” Zach said. “That was kind of the very beginning of this relationship.”

Zach described a rapid clinical response after starting medication. “I started on a low dose of a D2 dopamine partial agonist, and within 2 weeks [it] dramatically increased my fluency to a pretty remarkable extent,” he said. “It was almost overnight that I had just tremendous quality of life and fluency improvements.”

That improvement came with a new challenge when insurance changes required him to transfer care. “The psychiatrist who I met with was super excited and curious about the fact that there were pharmaceutical treatments to stuttering, but had no context or education about it,” Zach said. “It was up to me as the patient to be like, ‘Hi, I’ve been on this for years. It’s going very well. I’d like to continue it. And here’s the research that suggests how promising it is.’”

While receptive, the clinician lacked training. “They were incredibly open-minded, but just hadn’t had the resources or the education to treat it themselves,” Zach said.

The functional impact of treatment extended well beyond speech. “Fluency gets pretty intertwined with my ability to communicate with the world around me,” he said. “My ability to communicate…is so tied to my quality of life.” He added, “Once everything stops being so hard, it becomes easier to pursue the things that are really important.” With improved communication, he said, “everything becomes easier.”

Now involved with STARS, Zach described the volume of unmet need. “We get hundreds of messages from the website of people who want help, want education,” he said. “It’s both people who stutter who want help, and it’s also clinicians and doctors who find the website and are blown away by it. And it's so overwhelming to see the quantity of people that need help and so exciting to be in a position where I'm on the team that is able to offer the help.”

Looking ahead, Maguire, who also is a person who stutters, said he is excited to continue to educate other clinicians, like Zach did his new doctor, about how psychiatry, neurology, and other fields can work together to improve the lives of patients. “I look forward to bringing the whole world together, the whole health care space together, to educate,” Maguire said. “I've only been interested in it since age 4 when I began to talk.”