It may not be a permanent condition, as muteness can be caused or manifest due to several different phenomena, such as physiological injury, illness, medical side effects, psychological trauma, developmental disorders, or neurological disorders.
Most have inhibited temperaments and manifest social anxiety. For children with Selective Mutism, their mutism is a means of avoiding the anxious feelings elicited by expectations and social encounters. Children with traumatic mutism usually develop mutism suddenly in all situations.
Some of the causes of psychogenic mutism may be general anxiety or past trauma. For example, a child who is learning to speak might stop speaking if he or she is molested or threatened.
Selective mutism is an anxiety disorder that causes people to freeze up and turn silent in certain stressful situations — school is the most frequently reported one, as the disorder often pops up by age 5, when kids start attending preschool or kindergarten.
When mutism occurs as a symptom of post-traumatic stress, it follows a very different pattern and the child suddenly stops talking in environments where they previously had no difficulty. Another misconception is that a child with selective mutism is controlling or manipulative, or has autism.
Intense emotions, such as anger, frustration, or sadness, can become overpowering and make it challenging to engage constructively in the conversation. Shutting down may be an automatic defense mechanism to protect oneself from further emotional distress.
Speech or language problems such as stuttering (a stuttering child may experience bullying because of it, causing shyness in speaking, which may lead to selective mutism) Traumatic experiences like physical or sexual abuse. Family history of selective mutism or anxiety disorders.
Mutism can be a tricky diagnosis to make. Sometimes the culprit is purely physical: damage to the brain and/or speech muscles can leave a person mute. Sometimes the culprit appears to be emotional or mental. Other times, you'll run into some combination of the two.
Other symptoms
Besides lack of speech, other common behaviors and characteristics displayed by selectively mute people, according to Elisa Shipon-Blum's findings, include: Shyness, social anxiety, fear of social embarrassment or social isolation and withdrawal. Difficulty maintaining eye contact.
Though elective mutism is no longer recognized by most psychiatrists, it is a popular character element or plot point in stories and movies. Many characters choose to stop speaking, for various reasons. Even more commonly, there are also characters who stop speaking after a traumatic incident.
Selective mutism, meanwhile, causes children to display symptoms that may lead to alarm bells ringing for an indication of autism or even ADHD.
Planning for incapacities or blind, mute, deaf physical disability. Blind, deafness and mute are physical disabilities and as such could limit how you handle your financial and medical affairs.
Feeling tired or stressed
Simply being tired or fatigued can make it hard to think of the right words. And when you're worried about being judged by others or feel embarrassed, you may freeze up or struggle to talk.
Without vocal cord function, one can only whisper. And some people might think that whispering rather than trying to make use of our vocal cords might speed recovery. It might feel like we need to exert less force and strain on our vocal cords.
Organic mutism is mutism caused by brain injury, such as with drug use or after a stroke. Cerebellar mutism is mutism caused by the removal of a brain tumor from a part of the skull surrounding the cerebellum, which controls coordination and balance.
Dysarthria means difficulty speaking. It can be caused by brain damage or by brain changes occurring in some conditions affecting the nervous system, or related to ageing. It can affect people of all ages. If dysarthria occurs suddenly, call 999, it may be being caused by a stroke.
The most research-supported treatment for selective mutism is behavioral and cognitive behavioral therapy. Behavioral therapy approaches, including gradual exposures, contingency management, successive approximations/ shaping, and stimulus fading, are successful in the treatment of childhood anxiety.
Mutism is defined as an inability or unwillingness to speak, resulting in the absence or marked paucity of verbal output. It is a common presenting symptom seen in various disorders, including psychiatric as well as medical disorders.
Situational Mutism (SM), also called Selective Mutism, is an anxiety-based mental health disorder which usually commences in early childhood. Those with SM speak fluently in some situations but remain consistently silent in others. They may have a blank expression, or appear 'frozen' when expected to speak.
“In the face of physical or emotional pain, or a traumatic incident, our sympathetic nervous system has three responses: fight, flight or freeze. Emotional numbing is freezing. Our brain shuts down as a protective response to keep us safe when our nervous system is overloaded,” he says.
It's most commonly associated with social phobia, but anxiety in general causes people to want to avoid things that increase their anxiety - like talking. Have you ever had a thought you wanted to share, started to put it into words and then found that the words seemed to come out wrong?