‘Really Being Heard and Understood’

When a floormate in Queen Anne’s Hall asked Nelson Almeida ’13 to join a group heading to the South Campus Dining Hall for dinner during his freshman year, Almeida said he wasn’t hungry. In reality, he was famished, but paralyzed by a force greater than hunger: fear.

Almeida had stuttered all his life. The teasing of his peers had pushed him into choosing silence more often than speaking. So that evening, he left for the dining hall a few minutes after the group and sat alone at a table, hiding his face behind a splayed-open Diamondback. 

Now he’s one of two University of Maryland graduates seeking to remove the stigma around stuttering as volunteer leaders of support groups—both based on the work of the UMD researcher who reframed their thinking about stuttering. Almeida leads Academics Who Stutter, while Aidan Marshall-Cort ’21 runs Manifest, geared toward Black teenagers and men. 

Both Almeida and Marshall-Cort had been through years of speech therapy by the time they arrived at UMD. “We would practice different techniques to mask my stutter and to present as fluent, which at the time was what I valued most,” said Marshall-Cort. But striving for fluency—the absence of stuttering—often meant that Almeida and Marshall-Cort simply avoided talking. 

“I was bullied and teased quite a bit,” said Marshall-Cort. “I was afraid to make friends or speak up in class even though I knew the answer. I’d skip class and not do any sort of presentation.”

By his senior year of high school, Marshall-Cort was ready for a new approach. With the encouragement of teachers, he’d become president of his school’s chapter of Key Club, an undertaking that had shown him that “people listen and my voice can really lead.” 

One afternoon while working at UMD’s Eppley Recreation Center, a gym-goer noticed that Marshall-Cort was wearing a pin that said, “I Stutter.” She suggested that he meet her adviser, then-Clinical Professor Vivian Sisskin, a pioneer in the field known as Avoidance Reduction Therapy for Stuttering (ARTS). 

The approach encourages people to embrace their identity as a person who stutters, striving not for perfect fluency but for confident and spontaneous communication, stutter and all. It blends cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness therapy and modern counseling strategies to reduce what Sisskin calls “struggle,” or the physical and emotional blocks that people use to prevent themselves from stuttering. (Roughly 1% of the world’s population has a long-term stutter, and the issue disproportionately affects boys and men.) 

“For a long, long time, people rejected ARTS because people who stutter were buying into the self-stigma,” said Sisskin, who is based in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences' Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. “Over the last 10 years, people have moved to a model of disability where they are looking at society to change, not the individual.”

Marshall-Cort and Almeida both found the approach revolutionary. “At first, I thought (Sisskin) was a quack, but I was out of options, so I said ‘yes,’ and I’m so grateful I did,” said Almeida. “Communicating more clearly was definitely a game-changer. People had to be a bit more patient and wait a few seconds, but what I would say would make a lot more sense.”

For Marshall-Cort, the chance to meet others who stuttered was at once difficult and groundbreaking. “When I heard other people stutter for the first time, I was extremely upset and had visceral reactions because I was projecting so much anger onto them that I felt inside toward myself.” 

Eventually, he realized that this group offered him something he’d never had before: shared experiences. “The fear of phone calls, the fear of ordering food at a drive-through, the fear of talking to girls, the fear of talking at a party—I finally found a community of people who understood,” he said.

After graduating, both Almeida and Marshall-Cort wanted to give back to the community from which they’d gained so much. Through the Sisskin Stuttering Center, they created their own support groups. 

In 2023, Almeida, who earned a doctorate in physical therapy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, started Academics Who Stutter, a space where people in higher education could talk about their fear of teaching in front of a classroom, how they overcame their worries or navigating job interviews. The virtual group has had participants from as far away as France, Australia and the Philippines. 

Through Marshall-Cort’s Manifest, started in 2024, Black teens and men who stutter can discuss the unique issues that they face. A personal trainer and competitive power lifter, Marshall-Cort knows that the first two traits people notice about him when he walks into a room are the color of his skin and his large size. “They combine both things, and see I’m a big, Black man,” an identity that often evokes a certain set of prejudices and implicit biases. 

Hearing Marshall-Cort speak, which can include pausing and stuttering, may change those perceptions. “People may think that I lack intelligence, maybe I have an intellectual disability. Combine that with being a Black man, and it feels as though you’re less respected automatically.”

Almeida and Marshall-Cort both hope that their groups give people the chance to find the common ground with others that they found through Sisskin. “It’s been wonderful seeing new people join and meet others—they’re talking to people who not only look like them but talk like them,” said Marshall-Cort. “There’s this wonderful moment of: ‘I’m really being heard and understood here.’”