MIDLAND, Texas — Actor Bruce Willis recently revealed that he was diagnosed with aphasia, which led him to step away from acting. This leaves many to wonder, what is aphasia?
It's a disorder that results in the loss of language or the ability to put words with the ideas you have and express them fluently.
People put their thoughts into words every day, but for people with aphasia, that can be a little more difficult.
"Really, what it has in common is that people have a difficult time finding the right word to relay the right meaning," Beth Crawford, program director of Aphasia Center of West Texas said. "So it might be something as simple as or as mild as not being able to come up with the name of the person that you visited with last week."
Aphasia doesn't affect everyone in the same way. Cases can range from mild to severe.
"It goes from a mild loss of language, to a very severe and total loss of language, and for some people who have that degenerative process, they can lose language gradually over time," Crawford said.
So who does aphasia affect? It can affect anyone who's had a stroke, a brain injury, some sort of head trauma or even brain tumors. While more common in adults, aphasia can also be seen in children.
"About 30% of every stroke victim has a resulting aphasia," Crawford said. "One person every four minutes in the United States acquires aphasia. Babies and children have disease processes and strokes that happen too often, and so it can affect their language as well."
West Texas is equipped to help people who are dealing with aphasia, and it takes a holistic approach when it comes to working with anyone who has it.
"We think about things in terms of how they participate in life, so we might work with them on how to make it a more conducive environment for communication," Crawford said. "We might work with their loved ones, their communication partners, and train them and how to support their conversation. We might use a variety of tools like gesture, or writing, or drawing, or technology to be able to augment their communication attempts."
Perhaps more than anything, Crawford wants people to know this about people with aphasia.
"People with aphasia are not incompetent," Crawford said. "They are competent. They have intact intelligence. If they don’t, it’s not because of the aphasia itself, there’s something else that’s going on."