Being a specialist Stroke Speech & Language Therapist, it’s an important month for me. It’s Aphasia Awareness Month.

Aphasia is a language disorder that is caused by damage to the language centres of your brain, as a result of a neurological condition such as stroke, brain injury or tumour. With aphasia you have difficulty understanding, speaking, reading, writing and using gestures. Your cognition can be affected too (attention & Listening, memory, insight, ability to problem solve and multitask).

1 in 3 people who have had a stroke experience aphasia. We don’t hear much about it due to a lack of awareness. My goal is to increase awareness amongst the community, so we can support people better.

I often find that in our busy lives when we are given information (e.g. leaflets or see a post with lots of writing), we only read the first few sentences and disregard the rest, missing out on important information. So this year I wanted to find a creative way to capture the public’s attention and educate them on the importance of aphasia.

I saw an opportunity when I came across Rekha Padan (MUA & body artist) who was accepting body art challenges. I spoke to her about raising awareness for this cause in an artistic way – by conveying this important message to educate others and capture people’s attention. She had never done anything like this before and found the challenge exciting… plus it meant she developed an understanding of what aphasia is. Score!

We had a chat about conveying this message only using pictures and symbols, which would make it accessible to everyone. I asked Rekha to use pictures and symbols around her face/chest to show the difficulties that people with aphasia have e.g. books to symbolise difficulty with reading, pencils in her hair for difficulty with writing, a confused face with question marks to represent difficulty with understanding. And on the right side of her face she illustrated the connection being broken from the brain to the mouth to represent difficulty speaking. Cognition was symbolised with the cog wheels.

I wanted the brain to be colourful as our brain is incredible and that’s where all the magic happens. It helps us with understanding, expressing and being creative – all the things we take for granted. I also asked Rekha to draw pieces of the jigsaw puzzles to symbolise the therapist supporting people and helping them to fit the pieces of their life back together.

Rekha excelled in the challenge and has done an incredible job in helping to raise awareness. I can’t thank her enough for putting my ideas into practise. It’s been a huge success!