I started stuttering around age eight (don't really remember because it didn't bother me as much as a kid). It is also genetic for me, as I have an uncle that stutters and I'm pretty sure my dad himself had some speech problems growing up, but I don't know if it's a full-on stutter. It also may have been caused by my school speech therapist in the first grade treating me for a lisp I had. According to the speech therapist I saw later on, this was way too early to be correcting speech impediments, and likely led to the onset of my stutter a couple of years later. I don't remember when I saw my speech therapist for the first time, but I think I was in fifth or sixth grade. My parents were concerned that I wasn't growing out of it, so they found the best speech therapist in the state. I don't remember much about it, except that we practiced a lot of slow reading and strategies to get out of blocks. I eventually stopped going to see her since it was pretty expensive and I didn't see any big improvements. My speech was okay for a while, but eighth grade hit and it got to its most severe point in my life. I had really bad anxiety about public speaking to the point where it was affecting my schoolwork. Out of desperation, we went back to the same speech therapist I had seen before and I did more of the same stuff. Mostly focused on the mechanics of my stuttering and how I could escape a block, with some psychology stuff in there to make me accept my stutter. It helped a little bit, but my therapist and I started to clash. She wanted me to make speech therapy my top priority (like practicing my strategies multiple hours a night), but I had started high school already and was trying to get into a good college. I didn't work as hard at it as she wanted me to, and she was not happy about that. She also kept pushing me to go to meet-ups with other stutterers and the thought of this terrified me. We eventually parted ways because we couldn't agree on how I should progress, and forging along without any therapy, my speech actually improved considerably by the time I graduated high school. I'm in med school now, and my stutter goes in and out. It can be moderate when I'm really stressed, but it's mild for the most part. I'm still not convinced that speech therapy works. I certainly respect people in the profession, but for me, my stuttering didn't get better until I started to forget that I stutter. Maybe speech therapy works for the extreme cases to get them to the point where they can speak somewhat fluently and then "forget" about their stutter. Who knows.