My 15 year old son is not talking to anyone

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I don't think you need to add "Selective Mutism" to it.

Just being overwhelmed can make someone with an ASD lose speech.

It's two different things, and the latter is the easier explanation for it.

Ragnar,

First thanks for being a cool dad, and for having a cool name (from Rorikstead, perhaps?)

When I was his age I didn't talk much. These days I tend to prefer texting. I do hate being "pushed" into communicating with others; it can trip an episode as fast as just about anything.

If an area of one of my interests comes up I will talk with (at?) someone like mad. Otherwise not so much. Great that you are choosing to share xbox time with him.

You son sounds a bit like a typical 15 year old, and also a bit like a typical aspie. If you continue to allow him to find his own way into late adolescents and early adulthood, and maybe help shield him a bit from the demands of well-meaning but misguided NT's that want him to be someone else, I think chances are quite good he will mature into a mentally and emotionally healthy young man. (Just maybe a bit of the quiet type, but that's ok

After sen the movie “Temple Grandine” (for the 5th time) I think you aught to se it, the movie shows a lot of what is the problem of thinking as an autistic, and having problems to understand ordinary people. You have to be aware of, that we autistic differs a lot, wee all have our own way of thinking. Not as Neuro Typical (NT) people, they are mostly cast in to the same mold.
I do not worry about your 15 year old son. Probably he is getting tire to talk to people that does not understand what he is trying to communicate. If you are a person with logical thinking, it is not easy to communicate with people that talks by the unlogical social rules. It just makes you tired, if you can't find any meaning in what they are saying, then you better think for your self, until you find how to deal with TN-people.

I am 66, and retired from my work as a gearbox designer, after I found out that my workmates were trying to negotiate the laws of nature, while we were trying to solve problems. It only ended up leaving us with loads of new problems. So I decided to retire one and a half year in advance.
It is not easy to communicate with NT-people when they don't understand what you are saying.

I think it will take your son time to get back to try talk to others, he probably need some time to find he's way of dealing with the rest of the world.
The important thing to make him understand, is that he is not wrong, he has only bounced down on the Wrong planet. It takes som time to find out how to communicate with the dull NT-spices living around.

A lot of people with autistic children I know,have found, after there sons and daughters are diagnosed with Aspergers or Autism, has found out that they have a similar diagnose for them selves.
(Sort for my spelling, I am a dyskertletkik, bad on sppppreling, an I am also by nature a swead)

All throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I did everything I could to try to become social. I forced myself to be social and I was relatively successful; I could function in every social environment, though everyone around me always knew that something was strange about me--they just couldn't put their finger on it.

Despite all of my success, I never enjoyed myself in any of those social scenarios and all of those friends are gone because I don't want that many friends. There is no way I am ever going to become an extroverted person, no matter how good I get at pretending to be normal.

Your son may be the same, and announcing "You should make some friends and go outside more" every time you see him is just going to make him feel like s**t. It won't accomplish anything.

I'm 15, but NT. sometimes teens just don't feel like talking. School gets intense, and BAM we all get overloaded with homework and stuff.

Oh, awesome to have a younger non-autistic here. Most of the NTs are parents of autistics, and of course older than 15. Getting a perspective on teen culture, even from someone who's ADHD and thus not quite neurotypical, will be useful.

Yes, sometimes autistics just don't feel like talking. I think it's probably a version of the same thing TechnicalAmateur mentions; we're overloaded with stuff, and we dump the hardest stuff so we can focus on survival. Whether that's schoolwork, a stressful environment, or just general exhaustion from being a teenager (which is tough and not for sissies; I know this, I speak as a former teen)... there's many reasons why we might just go quiet for a while.

If communication is still possible, if we can ask for help in an emergency, if we can tell someone if something is hurting us--then that's the important thing.

If this goes on for more than a few months, and your son is still communicating well via text, e-mail, or IM, you might talk to your son about whether he might want to try a VOCA--typing instead of talking, with text to speech. Might sound odd as a solution for someone who, technically, can talk (but is currently not able to do so)--but it's kind of the way someone for whom walking is very difficult or exhausting might use a wheelchair not because they can't walk, but because there are other things they need to spend their energy on. For someone who only goes quiet some of the time, you mightn't have to buy a dedicated device; if he has a smartphone or a laptop, it probably has the ability to run a program that'll do the talking for him.

I remember one time my best friend and I were both hanging out in the living room and we were having a conversation through IM on our laptops.

Its much easier for me to communicate like that when the subject is important because I can arrange my thoughts easier when I type them out. I find it very hard to have long or important conversations when I have to talk.

Well i know personally.

Having to be at school, its basically like prison. Then having to be there and get tired from all the people, input and noise, then having to do somework, then parents wanna talk to you.

I understand why there isnt a need to talk to anyone- Mentally tired. When you get home and or weekend you just want to be alone and have silence.

I dont envy kids going through that nightmare. Its even worse today, since kids arent exactly getting nicer, kids have mobil phones to harass people they dont like and there is more and more kids in the class room than there were in the past.

Luckily half way through my school years i got into a special class, there there was only like 7 other kids compared to 20-22.

Re: Birthdays

I find that any occasion that makes me the center of attention, especially birthdays, will often shut me down. I find it taxing enough to engage in normal day-to-day interactions; occasions that call for me to act in certain socially-expected ways (e.g. to be the happy and cheerful Birthday Boy) just put on extra layers of expectations. I prefer to ignore my birthdays and like it better when people allow me to do that.

Also, birthdays and other holidays can be emotional and emotionally demanding times. For most people these are pleasant emotions; for others not so much. They can also be occasions to reflect back on the prior year and project forward into the coming year - not always a positive experience.

This is actually a tangent I think but I did something similar three years ago. I now really regret it because while I may not have burned bridges I certainly let them rot. I just didnt talk to anyone for around 3 years and became absorbed in work/gaming/reading. I snapped out of it a while back to find my new-found interest in communicating not reciprocated with some people being actively angry at me for ceasing communication.