Good Housekeeping did a valuable article recently on a rare anxiety disorder called “selective mutism,” and we wanted to share it with you here. Below is an excerpt, and if you recognize yourself or someone you love in it and are in the greater Cleveland area, we hope you’ll reach out to us for an evaluation and diagnosis.
When Jenny Foster picked up her older daughter from preschool one day in fall 2010, the teacher approached her with an odd question. “She asked, ‘Does Lily know how to talk?'” recalls Jenny, 34. After three months in the classroom, Lily, then 4, hadn’t spoken a word to her peers or her teacher. Jenny and her husband, Drew, 35, were shocked.
“At home, Lily was a chatterbox,” says Jenny, now a preschool teacher herself. “She was always talking to her younger sister, Ella, and playing dress-up. She acted like a normal kid.”
When Jenny asked Lily why she hadn’t spoken in school, Lily just shrugged. But Jenny began noticing a pattern: Despite her bubbly personality, Lily was silent everywhere they went, from the grocery store to the pediatrician’s office. Jenny realized Lily had been that way for as long as she could remember. Concerned, she turned to the Internet. Her frantic searching turned up a rare anxiety disorder called selective mutism (SM), in which children often speak fluently at home but stay silent in other settings like school and friends’ houses. The disorder affects an estimated 1% or more of the population and is often mistaken for a better-known problem such as autism, oppositional behavior or intellectual disability (low IQ) — or, as in Lily’s case, plain old shyness. When Jenny asked her family physician about SM, the doctor said she’d never heard of it; nevertheless, she promised Jenny that Lily would outgrow the behavior.