You don’t need 35 reasons why aphasia awareness month matters. You know that when we talk about aphasia, the world learns about aphasia.
The amazing thing we learned when Bruce Willis’s family spoke up about his diagnosis is that when people learn about aphasia, their next question is “how can we help?” We saw this time and time again speaking to the media that week: What do we need to know about aphasia, and how can we engage in aphasia-friendly communication.”
We need to keep talking.
Talking about aphasia, specifically. Every four years, we run our aphasia awareness survey, questioning everyday Americans about their level of aphasia awareness. We decided to run the survey again this year rather than wait another two years. This is what we found.
For the 2022 survey, we collected data from 1,062 respondents (census represented), 18 and older, from across the US. We’ve highlighted some of the key takeaways below, including the fact that 40% of respondents had heard of aphasia and could identify it as a language disorder, up from 7% in 2020.