Word: sm
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...root of the problem in most cases is an extreme form of social anxiety or phobia. "It is a fear that can literally make it impossible to speak," says Dr. Elisa Shipon- Blum, a Philadelphia-based clinician who specializes in treating selective mutism. As with most social anxieties, SM is more common in girls and is believed to have a strong genetic component. About 70% of kids with SM have an immediate family member who also struggles with social anxiety...
...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's website, selectivemutism.org gets 450,000 hits...
Young children with SM may be expected to have a playdate with the same peer every week, whether or not the child speaks to the friend. "We have to build them up inside before we even talk about talking. I need to give them back control within themselves," says Shipon-Blum...
...standard practice in the field. Many doctors either offered parents hopeless-sounding diagnoses, such as autism or mental retardation, or 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...