6 minute read
Speaking From Experience To Help Others Open Up
As a speech-language pathologist at the American Institute for Stuttering (AIS), Mark O’Malia ‘14 provides specialized, universally affordable stuttering therapy and support for clients ages 2 to 80.
We all carry with us distinctive traits that make us unique. Oftentimes, though, they take time to fully appreciate.
Mark O’Malia ‘14, M.S., CCC-SLP, knows the feeling.
“I stutter, which is something that runs in my family. It started when I was 3,” said the Wilkes-Barre native. “There are a lot of misconceptions about stuttering. Really, it’s just a neurological condition, but growing up with it was just an incredibly challenging experience.”
Eventually, O’Malia learned to not only accept his condition, but to thrive with it – thanks in large part to the welcoming community he found at The University of Scranton.
His time at the University led him to his “dream job” as a speech-language pathologist at the American Institute for Stuttering (AIS), where since 2017 he’s provided specialized, universally affordable stuttering therapy and support for children and adults.
O’Malia commutes to AIS’s New York City headquarters from his Philadelphia home, working with clients ages 2 to 80.
“We want to make communication easier for them, but we’re also helping them develop self-confidence and self-acceptance,” he said. “So much of it is just having real conversations with my clients. I shut my office door and I’m able to ask them, ‘What kind of life do you want to live? What are your goals for therapy?’ I want them to make more friends, to have confidence to go on that job interview, to do that thing that lights them up. A lot of it is stepping into who you want to be. Stuttering is something that becomes easier to deal with the more open you are about it, the more you’re able to physically and emotionally move in it. That allows you to become more confident. It’s not about overcoming stuttering, but how to live with it. That’s the success.
“I take my job very seriously,” he continued. “It’s such a privilege to show a client that I do understand what they’re going through. To be able to say, ‘I know how hard it is, and we can work together to make life worthwhile for you.’ That’s the most gratifying part of my job.”
The job also brings with it a strong advocacy component.
“Stuttering is still kind of a misunderstood thing, so we try to bring it to the mainstream and bring knowledge to people,” O’Malia said. “It’s through human connections and telling our stories that we make change.”
Obviously, O’Malia brings plenty of firsthand experience to the role. As a child and adolescent, he struggled to protect himself from the cruelty that stutterers often experience, whether he was interacting with peers or ordering food at a restaurant.
“There’s a lot of reinforcement that you’re different, so I went inward a lot, and felt I couldn’t show the authentic me,” he said. “I couldn’t do some of the things I wanted to do, like acting or participating in student government. I felt this incredible weight of avoiding life. I had speech therapists, but a lot of that was, ‘You are broken, here are ways you can fix yourself.’ I would think, ‘I really wish I had someone who understood this.’”
His outlook changed upon enrolling at the University, where he thrived as a student in the psychology program and formed a close circle of friends.
Meanwhile, he got heavily involved in campus life, serving as a Search Retreat leader, a research assistant, and vice president of Psi Chi, the international honor society for psychology. He also found great personal fulfillment during a service trip to El Salvador.
“Every year, I felt I had real opportunities at the University to get help exploring who I was. They really cared about you as an individual, and your development as a person,” O’Malia said. “You get to know other students and find commonalities among you. I think it was a really important step for me to have a space to open up among fellow students and friends.”
In addition, he sought out local stuttering support groups and attended the National Stuttering Association’s annual conference in Arizona. Then, the summer before his senior year, he enrolled in a three-week intensive program at AIS, where he learned to better cope with his stuttering through making phone calls, approaching people on the subway, and performing other activities that “pushed me out of my comfort zone and allowed me to gain a lot of self-confidence,” he said.
By the end of the program, O’Malia knew he wanted to pursue speech-language pathology as a career. So, after graduating with honors from the University in 2014, he enrolled in Penn State University’s Communication Sciences and Disorders graduate program.
During his studies, he served as a clinical intern at AIS, where he worked with his former therapist. That experience eventually led to a full-time job offer, and he’s been there ever since.
O’Malia was thrilled to learn the University recently started its own master’s program in Speech-Language Pathology.
“It’s very cool to see the Speech-Language program is developing, because Scranton has such great programs in the health sciences. It makes me really excited that they’ll be producing future clinicians in the field,” said O’Malia, the son of Patti and Mark O’Malia.
“I genuinely feel very lucky to have found something that makes me very fulfilled in life,” he said. “And because of the University, I found different ways to find and take care of myself, so that I could go out and take care of others.”
Stuttering is still kind of a misunderstood thing, so we try to bring it to the mainstream and bring knowledge to people. It’s through human connections and telling our stories that we make change.
