Selective mutism vs Social Anxiety

Hello to all,

I'm confused about the information I'm getting from selective mutism on different sites. Are SM and SA separate disorders, or is SM a symptom of SA (or alternately, is SA a symptom of SM)?

I have undiagnosed social anxiety, though I'm absolutely certain I have it. I stumbled across the term selective mutsim the other day, and it explains so much of what I've beat myself up over for for the past 5 years of my life.

I'm 18 years old. and I think my social anxiety started out in 4th grade and has gotten progressively worse over the years. I started to really notice that I would not be able to bring myself to speak and shut down starting freshman year of high school. This is usually towards authoritative figures or in groups of classmates. It's almost as though I am trapped in a paralyzed body during these times. I become tense, unable to move or make eye contact, even when I am yelling at myself in my head to spit out my words. Could this be SM? Is it possible for teens/adults to have SM, or is it just SA?

I think SM is mostly in younger kids. I got some strange looks in professional settings when I tried to convince them I had it as an adult. The way you described the feelings of paralyzation sounds like a panic attack. I'd just try to work on the SA and forget about SM.

I have social discomfort (completely fine when alone) but when people are around I get anxiety so 'social anxiety' could be coined, anxiety or panic attacks aren't uncommon for me and twice they got so bad that something new happened, I couldn't speak as hard as I tried and badly I wanted to I couldn't even make noise, it was like something happened to my voice box or throat never experienced that before, and in my mind *this must be what selective mutism is like* it only lasted a minute or two. So if social discomfort causes enough stress and social apprehension to even speak or make noise I'd think the root problem lay in the perception of social situations.

Searching for “selective mutism” in Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (7th ed.) I find the following sentence “Anxiety disorders have peak ages of onset in childhood and adolescence, although only two, separation anxiety disorder and selective mutism, occur solely in childhood.”
My social anxiety was very much restricted to speaking. At home I did speak, although we did little else then having quarrels. At school, clubs, holiday camps etc I gave only simple answers when asked, but didn’t speak out of myself. At primary and the first year of secondary school I did speak with my school friends, but later I only occasionally spoke freely with anyone.
Out of boredom I started daydreaming which made it only more difficult to be alert enough to get into to contact with others.
I saw my problem mainly in terms of speaking with others. I also didn’t do other things but I thought that I couldn’t do them because I didn’t talk.
At primary school and first years of secondary school I had some of the signs of social phobia like blushing when asked something in a large group. Later I also had problems when I suddenly had to answer a question for a lecture-hall of 300 students, but I don’t know if I blushed.
I had the same problem with writing essays. I only wrote them when it was writing the essay or school failure. And I went very far in that. Teachers did sometimes make special provisions for me. Instead of splitting the task into small peaces to make it easier for me, they sometimes made the engagement that if I wrote a single essay, I wouldn’t have to write the five essays I still had to write.
Only when I was 21 years old I began to talk more freely. But only when with a few persons, not in workgroups and the like. Sometimes I had to talk for a workgroup, but that was very difficult.

Hi Guangxi,
My situation is exactly similar to yours. Especially the daydreaming part. Please tell if you have recovered from this problem and how did you manage to do it.

SA is a symptom of SM, you can have SA without having SM, but, you can't have SM without SA.
SM is typically found in younger kids, but, mine definitely became much more evident around the time I was 12 years old. There are ways around it and to help with communication, but, it is almost impossible to fully treat it once you're not a kid anymore.
What you're describing definitely sounds like SM and is almost identical to what I experience with my SM.

Best of luck!
xx