Some of the clients that I work with use Alternative/Augmentative Communication (AAC) strategies. Well, technically, we all use AAC strategies because AAC is anything that is used for communication that is not the spoken word. So, our facial expressions, gestures, etc are AAC strategies.
Anyway, some clients do not develop functional speech for a variety of reasons and some clients lose functional speech. Some of my clients have motor speech disorders, muscle weakness, general developmental delays that inhibit their speech development. When clients have motor speech disorders, their neurology is different. Either the brain doesn’t make the right message to send to the muscles, sends the wrong message even though the correct one has been created, or the muscles “misfire.” A motor speech disorder can also be caused by increased or decrease muscle tone (resulting in decreases strength and/or coordination of the muscles).
When a client does not have a functional communication system, a lot of factors need to be considered because AAC systems often get abandoned. I don’t know how many times I have walked into a room where a client was but the device was not accessible. Many communication partners just don’t buy into AAC. I have had many people tell me, “but I understand him” or “he doesn’t have much to say anyway.” How do you know that? We don’t really truly know what/how much someone else wants to communicate or what they want to talk about until they tell us. We are not mind readers, no matter how well we know the person.
In my current job, many of my colleagues have limited experience with AAC and I see them making some of the mistakes that I made when I was a younger clinician. Therefore, I decided to develop a one-day seminar on the topic. My employer wasn’t thrilled with the idea but I was insistent and the training department head loved the idea. So, someone in the training department did the organizing and I worked out the content. We had originally had the goal of 30-40 people, with 25 people being from outside of our organization. 46 ended up attending, with most of them paying a nominal fee to attend! It was a great day and I got really good feedback from it. I tried to give practical suggestions and the other therapists really seemed to appreciate that. It made me feel good as well. Most of my department didn’t attend but there are others who want the information. And more importantly, a voice outside the predominate one here got heard. Some information on other ways of doing things got shared.
