User:Well-rested/Charles Van Riper

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Charles Gage Van Riper (1905 - 1994) was a renown speech therapist who became internationally known as a pioneer in the development of speech pathology. A severe stutterer throughout his career, his pioneering work in speech pathology have left a lasting legacy on the field.

Biography
Charles Van Riper, known to his family as Cully, grew up in Champion Township, Michigan. He was the son of Champion's longtime physician, known as "Dr. Van". Charles was a severe stutterer, and had a "miserable childhood" growing up in in the midst of local superstition about stutterers. Charles attended several institutes for stutterers, but these provided inadequate treatment because at the time "nobody had actually taken the trouble to learn about stuttering, so nobody knew how to cure it". He subsequently started the field of speech pathology "almost out of desperation", and founded and headed the Western Michigan University's speech clinic, and was the first chair of its speech pathology and audiology department. During his career he became internationally known as a pioneer in the development of the science of speech pathology; he worked with thousands of stutterers, did research, and published a large number of books, articles and films on the subject. Under the pseudonym "Cully Gage", Charles also wrote The Northwoods Reader, a series of books based on life in Champion.

Charles stuttered throughout his career despite trying almost every sort of stuttering therapy, ranging from rhythmic control, relaxation, slow speech, and breathing exercises, to psychoanalysis and hypnosis. He eventually managed to become very fluent even though he continued to stutter. Charles wrote in a letter to a newsletter that he had lived a "very successful and happy life", a result of an idea that came to him while hitch-hiking his way home from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where he had spent a month as the hired man on a farm, pretending to be a deaf mute because his stuttering was so severe that he could not get any other employment: he met an old stutterer who said that he was "too old and tired to fight myself now so I just let the words leak out"; Charles realised that he should have been seeking a way of stuttering that would be tolerable both to others and himself, instead of avoiding and hiding his stutter.

Charles died in his home in Kalamazoo, after a long illness.

Legacy
Years after his death, Charles Van Riper's work continues to be referred to and analyzed. Methods in stuttering therapy that drew from his work have been called "Van Raperian therapy" and the "Van Riper Program", and his therapy methods have seen many applications, including uses in guides for speech therapists and in whole therapy programs. Even the verbal response patterns Charles used when conducting stuttering modification therapy have been analyzed: one found that "Van Riper's therapy during these videotaped sessions relied less on Confrontation and Self-Disclosure verbal responses and more on instructional, informational, and educational verbal response modes".

Charles was the subject of the Western Michigan University's informal talk for emeriti and friends on November 14, 2007, which discussed his professional history and writings about his childhood. Moreover, he has an award named after him, the Charles Van Riper Award, which "recognizes the achievements of individuals who have known the anguish of stuttering and the success of achieving effective communication". A series of nine films that show several of his therapy sessions with an adult stutterer and discusses the long term effectiveness of the therapy, has been called a "classic". Additionally, one of Charles' sayings would also be remembered years after his death: “Stuttering is everything we do trying not to stutter.”