speech disorder

[bigpine]

Have a pt who has a speech problem that i vaguely remember in nsg school 20 yrs ago....when she speaks, she gets stuck on a word and repeats "la, la, la, la", then can move on w/ her sentence. seems as though i remember this being a side effect of a drug or psych issue....any ideas???

[nightmare, RN]

Some of the older anti psychotics had these side effects,like Thioridizine IIRC.

[lucky1RN]

I'm no expert but are you sure she's not just stuttering? As far as terms from school...are you thinking about echolalia (repeating someone else's words) or palilalia (repeating your own words)?

[nightmare, RN]

In some forms of dementia this occurs.i have also had a resident with this trait.

[Selke]

I suggest you find a speech therapist who works at your hospital and ask her/him. Why not ask the pt?

There are too many possible causes of speech dysfluencies as the other posters have mentioned. If none of these are the cause, your pt may stutter, and is using "la la la" as a mechanism to "unblock" her speech when she is stuck on trigger words/ sounds.

I am a stutterer, my speech is mostly fluent now, except when fatigued and exhausted, and talking in a group situation gives me a panic attack. I learned these things when I (finally) had effective therapy in my early 20's. The speech therapist (who basically salvaged my life) used a behavior mod technique, the van Riper method, which has been improved upon by newer therapists. I did learn that stutterers will come up with unique ways to unblock speech blocks, which can be various physical movements, jerks, and other types of vocalization, which can look like tardive dyskinesia and other motor disorders caused by neuroleptics.

Please don't think your pt is mentally defective or of low intelligence due to a speech dysfluency. This is the most common assumption.