Communication is essential to life
Communication is essential to everything we all do – it’s how we share our ideas, thoughts and feelings. It’s how we are us. Everything we do involves communication. For people with disabilities communication is not always given the prominence it deserves. For instance, communication is not identified with clarity within NDIS services. Support for communication is usually provided within Capacity Building - Improved Daily Living, Other Therapy (speech pathology comes under the “other therapy” category). An improvement would be to feature Capacity Building - Improved Communication as a life skill and speech pathology as the relevant therapeutic support. Communication is an important issue.
We are social beings – communication is part of every interaction with another person, a group, online and via writing, photos, videos, songs and dance. It’s how we connect, it’s how we tell our stories. It is how we build our relationships and live our daily lives. It’s also how we all learn and work together. It’s the key issue for the biggest corporations in the world (just think about what they do). It is the single most important factor impacting every person’s quality of life.
In a study Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010) asked the question: “What reduces a person’s chances of dying the most?”. To put it another way, what helps people to stay alive? The answer was surprising. It was close relationships as the second highest predictor – the people you communicate with the most, your family and close friends, the people who care and look after you, and help you when you’re having a problem. The highest predictor of longevity was your social integration – how much you communicate with people day to day in the community. People you pass in the street, meet at shops, neighbours in your local area, people you talk to when you walk your dog. That sort of thing.
In her TED Talk, psychologist Susan Pinker elaborates on other research that found online interactions through social media did not have the same effect as face to face interactions. Being there and interacting with people in real life was most effective in it’s health benefits, releasing a cascade of neurotransmitters. Building your friendships and daily relationships in your community in person had a physiological impact on the brain, increasing positive hormones and reducing stress. Although Pinker also pointed to research emphasising the importance of speech in her TEDTalk, the take-home message for me was the importance of communication, of sharing our thoughts, opinions and feelings through language and through our social relationships.
For people with communication difficulties and communication disability, where they have little or no speech and rely on other methods of communication (such as signs, pictures, communication books, spelling and communication devices) close relationships are super important. And social integration is probably one of the hardest things for them to achieve. Social integration of people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) requires our whole community to learn about and value the different ways we communicate. It’s definitely worth aiming for though!
Everyone can communicate. Young children are never too young to begin learning to communicate; and adults are never too old to learn language. People with significant physical, sensory and cognitive challenges can learn to communicate and we can problem-solve ways for them to access language. They often need a lot of help to achieve this. It’s not easy.
Communication is the focus of this practice, finding ways for individuals with communication support needs to communicate more effectively in their everyday lives and providing communication partners with the skills to support them. In future blogs I’ll provide more information about the different ways we communicate.
References:
Pinker, S. (2017). TED Talk 2017: The secret to living longer may be your social life
