One of my biggest regrets in life is the amount of speech therapy I've done.  From the age of 17-22, for more than 5 years, I dedicated myself to speech therapy. I did an hour a day of breathing drills, reading aloud for 20 minutes, then I'd do other speech drills where I'd make phone calls and approach random strangers all the time to desensitize myself. I got involved in every public speaking related activity I could at university. I did debate clubs, Toastmasters, I made speeches very regularly, etc. And it worked! The hours a day of work paid off massively. My stutter went from moderate to undetectable and even eloquent. The speech therapy techniques that I practiced for hours a day gave me speech that others would interpret as fluent and also very articulate. It gave me a massive confidence boost too. I'd finally beaten my stutter, and it remained beaten for a good 5 years!  When I was 22, I got flu. I have no idea why, but over the course of the next few days, my 5-year-fluent speech went from being solid to completely dissipating.  Moreover, not only was my speech now as bad as it was before speech therapy, it was also _10 times worse_. When I recovered from flu, I did exactly the same as before. I kept at it with all the speech therapy, the clubs, for about 6 months afterwards. My stutter only became worse.  And there you have it. Speech therapy techniques worked for me for 5 years. They helped me beat my stutter. Then, for no apparent reason, they just stopped working. I did everything "right": I did the speech therapy plus the exposure therapy. It worked. Until it didn't.  And now I'm left with this. I spent hours a day of my life dedicating myself to speech therapy and doing it "right" and this is where it got me: my speech was worse than it had ever been, and now my self-esteem and confidence was based on appearing fluent to others. Speech therapy taught me nothing new or useful. It didn't give me skills I could apply to other things. It didn't make me a better, wiser person. It was just a huge, huge waste of time.  I decided that I could no longer rely on speech therapy. In my opinion, it does not offer me a permanent solution. Instead, I've gone to therapy to work on how I feel about myself to offer a more permanent solution that does not waste years of my life.