Topic Disorders Paper

MR. LAMM: APHASIA AND ITS EFFECTS FROM A STROKE

Mr. Lamm is a sixty-eight year old man who has Broca’s Aphasia, damage to the frontal lobe of the brain affecting motor movements and planning and orchestrating (Justice, 2010, p. 228), from having a stroke about ten years ago. Along with Broca’s Aphasia he also had Apraxia, a motor speech disturbance causing difficulty in planning and executing the volitional movements of speech (Justice, 2010, p. 222), which can be associated with aphasia. Because of his stroke and impacts on his speech and communication, Mr. Lamm had to retire from his career in the insurance industry (Community Impact, .22). He was still able to maintain a real estate portfolio and is in the process of building a new house for him and his wife, Karen. Affecting the left hemisphere of his brain, his stroke has significantly impacted his language skills. With about six months to a year of speech therapy, Mr. Lamm has improved his skills a considerable amount, and is able to carry on a conversation with minimal frustration and mistakes. Meeting with the Speech Pathologist, Mr. Lamm worked on his literacy, motor skills, and a few naming activities that helped him get his confidence to talk with others. Although Mr. Lamm has Apraxia and Broca’s Aphasia, he currently shows few physical or cognitive difficulties and with the help of his personality traits that helped contribute to his success, his intentions for talking have helped gain him strengths in his communication along with the support of his family and friends

Mr. Lamm has been doing speech therapy for about six months now. His speech and communications have improved significantly, and his personality has helped benefit him drastically, but he is still prone to obvious frustrations of not being able to say what he would like. His frustration is turned into determination to help himself to do better and try harder. In the videos seen, Mr. Lamm does not have...