Time to talk: counselling for people with dysphasia

Abstract

In this small-scale qualitative study, 20 dysphasic people, including some with severe language impairments, were offered up to 20 sessions of individual counselling. The trained counsellors were a speech and language therapist and a teacher who had personal experience of dysphasia. The paper describes how the service was set up, and how it was evaluated through the use of interviews before, during and after the process of counselling. In general, participants valued the service and a number of positive outcomes were described. Negative reactions were largely due to problems with the setting, timing and organization of the counselling and to the presence of social problems which could not be addressed through counselling. A number of recommendations for setting up a counselling service for people with dysphasia can be drawn from this study. These are discussed in this paper, together with the issues arising from the collaboration between dysphasic and non-dysphasic researchers.