Word: mutism
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...been diagnosed with severe depression and selective mutism, a social anxiety disorder that inhibited him from speaking. What was your first impression...
...absence of realistic programs to combat poverty in urban and rural areas. Unless these two future superpowers make efforts to bring all social classes under their umbrella of success, we cannot be euphoric over their one-dimensional growth. Arvind K. Pandey Allahabad, India Communication Trouble The report on selective mutism, the childhood disorder that keeps youngsters from speaking in public places [Feb. 6], reminded me of the importance of having continuous communication between schools and parents in order to evaluate and individualize the education for each student. It remains to be seen, however, whether school communities the world over will...
...Bergman and Shipon-Blum. Trained as an osteopathic family physician, Shipon-Blum had a pressing personal interest in the condition. Finding almost no good research on the subject, she had to resort to trial and error in order to help her daughter Sophie, now 11, overcome a paralyzing mutism. Today Shipon-Blum runs an SM clinic with a two-year waiting list and travels the U.S. speaking in hotel ballrooms packed with concerned parents, teachers and clinicians. She also founded the nonprofit Selective Mutism Group--Childhood Anxiety Network, which has become the major national advocacy group for SM. The group...
...dismissed their concerns as neurotic, telling them that their children would simply grow out of it. That message infuriates specialists like Shipon-Blum, who agrees that children with untreated SM may eventually manage to communicate in social situations but insists that without addressing the precipitating factors behind the mutism, debilitating anxieties are likely to persist into adulthood. "They may develop methods of coping, but are they happy and functioning?" she asks...
...subtle semantic change in the official diagnosis of this form of mutism that helped change doctors' perceptions, says Dr. Bruce Black, a psychiatrist in Wellesley, Mass., who conducted some of the first empirical studies on SM in the early 1990s. Until about 15 years ago, children were routinely considered to have "elective mutism," which suggests the silence is willful and controlling. "It was seen as a power struggle that manifested as a refusal to speak," says Black. "Now it is characterized as a failure to speak...