Catatonic schizophrenia is marked by striking motor behaviour, such as remaining motionless in a rigid posture for hours or even days, and by stupor, mutism, or agitation.
Tess, his eldest, goes silent in a frustrating case of selective mutism, Meg struggles with her newfound status as the youngest child and Evangeline, his free-spirited wife, descends into an unpredictable and destructive depression.
His mutism was, he says, a symptom of his Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism only diagnosed when he was 20.
Radiotherapy can have a number of adverse long term side effects including mutism, infertility and IQ diminution.
Once he recovers from his mutism (he lost the power of speech around the time when he came to in a trench holding a dead man's eyeball), he is by far the trickiest of Rivers's patients.
It was not until the Napsbury Mental Hospital that Opal was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia, but as early as 1916, she suffered a nervous breakdown that reportedly led to three months of mutism.
An 1871 electrotherapy textbook outlines treatments for hundreds of conditions, such as alcoholism, paralysis, dyspepsia, mutism, and "neurasthenia" — a form of nervous exhaustion that later came to be known as Americanitis.
Those with selective mutism can go an entire school year — or years — without uttering a word.
Re "To Help a Shy Child, Listen" (18 and Under, Sept. 17): Selective mutism is an anxiety-based condition that can be confused with shyness.
A trained therapy dog named Puppy eventually broke the back of her selective mutism.
And each suffers from selective mutism: Raj historically hasn't been able to talk to women unless he's drunk; Murray sits next to Mary every day but can never really express his love for her. 4. Sue Ann Nivens/Amy Farrah Fowler.
