ABSTRACT
Change is central to the idea of aphasia therapy. Whenever we (as therapists) engage with a person with aphasia, we hope to be able to offer some kind of intervention that will improve their quality of life, will improve their language skills, and will give them the means to change the way they interact with the world. We have a multitude of assessments, both quantitative and qualitative, that can be used to assess these changes. Because therapy is not simply “the delivery of treatment”, but an interactive process engaging and challenging both the person with aphasia and the therapists, we, as therapists, need to be equally open to change. One aspect of this is the willingness to drop or adapt therapy methods in the light of accumulating evidence of both their (in)effectiveness and (perhaps not unrelated) how they are seen by the client. More interesting is the challenge to what we value in therapy and what we count as “success” when there are mismatches between the different kinds of change (in assessments, targeted skills, quality of life, social engagement). Then we need to question which we value and why.
