Mute Autistics Question

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I'm quite familiar with Asperger's, but much less so autism. I have a question, but the premise itself might be wrong, so feel free to correct that if I'm totally off in left field.

My understanding is that in some cases of autism the person doesn't ever speak. But in some of these cases the person is able to communicate very fluidly by typing on the computer. So what I don't understand and would like to know more, are such autistics unable to talk? Or just dislike the act of talking so much that they voluntarily choose to remain silent?

My friends child is 11 and he has AS he also has selective mutism.
He can speak very well at home but no where else.
I have known him for years and he has never spoken to me
Stress and sensory overload affect him very badly

It depends on the person and depends on what you mean by talk.

Most people I know in that circumstance can make speech sounds that sound like talking at least some of the time. However these sounds either don't convey their thoughts at all, or don't convey their thoughts as well as typing does. Personally, I'm in a category where I'm mostly unable to talk at all, but can occasionally say words that have nothing to do with my thoughts whatsoever. So typing is the only way I can use words and make them at least approximate my thoughts. There are people who don't have speech even of the non-communicative kind but they are quite rare, whether they can type or not.

In my case, even when I had more speech and could even make it sound plausible to the situation much of the time, next to none of it expressed my thoughts. This was because my receptive language had lagged far behind my ability to express myself. This was true of typing as well to a slightly lesser extent. I had two things happen at the same time. I began losing the capacity for speech of any kind due to a movement disorder that sometimes occurs in autistic people. And I (after years of losing speech more and more) finally began to wrest control of words away from what I called the Translator (the "program" in my head that generated plausible words at the expense of communication). I was able slowly to gain control of typing almost completely (when I get tired or confused the Translator comes back) but was never able to gain much control over speech.

So both because of the movement disorder and the Translator effect, I have no meaningful speech (even on the rare occasions I have speech) and entirely type to communicate. This puts me in the same position as most "nonverbal/functionally mute" people I have met who type, despite the fact that when I had more speech I was able to sound more normal than most of them do. (FWIW, I have talked to several others who had the same pattern of receptive language delay as I did, and most of them developed the same tendency to put out words at all costs despite none or few of those words being communicative. So there's a whole category of autistic people who can barely communicate if at all but who "pass" as communicating by using echolalia combined with pattern matching. Some others didn't ever learn to talk much but did learn to type later on.)

None of this is voluntary for most of us unless you count suppressing noncommunicative words at times, which is not the same as being able to speak communicatively but just choosing not to. In the occasions I've known where people did make a choice, it was only a partial choice and also wasn't the same as being able to talk well but choosing not to -- avoiding something because of excruciating pain, overload, or inability to function as well as one does without it, is not a genuine choice in the same way as if a person spoke perfectly well and just decided they didn't feel like it.

Well for what it is worth here are my thoughts, I suspect that even many NTs need to do some internal translation into words before they speak. One friend of mine is a medical doctor, he once encountered a person (I assume a NT) who had some grave problem in their brain (something like a tumor). The person had lost the ability to translate their thoughts into words at the normal pace so their speach was very different to the "norm".

The thing I call the Translator didn't translate my thoughts into words. It took in the situation, searched for what other people said in the same situation, and repeated those people's words or an approximation of them. It was rare and coincidental if it matched my thoughts. The only thing that made it better than having no speech was that it prevented me from being underestimated as badly as people with zero speech are. But it did get me nearly killed on many occasions because it could not at all translate my real thoughts and experiences into language. And when those experiences were symptoms of serious medical conditions, I was as good as mute (that's what functionally mute means -- not unable to form words but as good as unable to form words given that it couldn't relate thoughts or experiences). Same when those experiences were horrific abuse and other situations I needed to tell someone. Please don't put it in the same category as needing time to translate thoughts into words. I was in my late teens before I could begin to consistently translate thoughts into words, and that was not the Translator's doing. The reason I chose such a bad name for it was because I chose that word when I still wasn't entirely able to use words to communicate, so I still used a lot of words that were subtly or not so subtly different from what I meant. I think today I might call it the Word Generator or something similar to emphasize that the words weren't translations of my thoughts at all. Needing time to come up with words isnt the same thing at all, although if you need enough time it can cause other serious problems.

I become mute when the objective is to relay information, and that objective is paramount. I can speak, but I can't speak AND reach that objective. At least, not with NTs whose "receivers" don't seem to be on. I wonder how it would be with one of you? Such communication probably wouldn't even be necessary...interesting thought.

Wow. I never thought much about that. That could explain a mountain of other stuff...

Sometimes it's because they have coexisting conditions like dyspraxia that prevent them from physically being able to form words with their mouths. I don't have dyspraxia, but sometimes I go mute and can't talk. I don't know what really causes it, though. It's not something physical.

Since speech has never been much of a problem for me, I'm not sure if this applies, but something came up during my evaluation that was a bit odd. My 'comfort zone' is effectively non-verbal. When I am doing something, such as my artwork, that is fully absorbing, I disconnect from verbal processing. The more focused and absorbed the less I am hooked into words. In my case, I suppose I would prefer to not speak as it often takes too much effort. I am not mute in any way shape or form, because I am quite capable of speech. I just find it annoying. I prefer silence.

Here's my two cents.

I had selective mutism from age 10 to 16. It wasn't as bad as me not being able to talk at all outside my home or similar, but it was brought on by stress and anxiety, so the more stressed or anxious I was, the less I talked, if it became too bad, I didn't talk at all. The worst was probably when I was 14 and 15, 'cause due to school stress and family issues I spent at least 3 months with out saying more than 2 words at a time and mostly writing in small pieces of paper and passing them on.

My dad wasn't living with me at the time (my parents divorced and I lived -and still do- with my mum), so when he would call he would do lengthy monologues and I would respond with "mmmm"s and "nhnnn"s, if he was lucky he would get a "yes" or "no" kind of answer. The thing is, I wanted to tell him many things, I wanted to tell him about my day, a certain grade I got that I was either happy or not too happy about, but I just couldn't. Words would form in my head, but wouldn't come out. And even if I managed to make a sound, I was always terrified that it would be misinterpreted and some sort of yelling or scolding would follow.

In other words, I was able to talk and communicate, which I did when the conditions were right (low stress and low anxiety) and I could in fact be very talkative if I wanted. But didn't do it because I couldn't manage to overcome the emotional factors that were restraining me. Once a psychologist caught what was happening and taught me to communicate better my feelings and taught my parents to be better listeners, the problem was pretty much solved.

Nowadays I still feel that need to NOT talk when things go badly, but I make an effort to communicate the basics of the problem that needs solving. It goes very much unnoticed from the outside, most people praise me for being so "able" to keep the communication flowing in bad to worst situations, and only people who really know me and have known me for years tend to notice that something changes in the way I talk and have made very fleeting remarks about it. It's a great effort I have to do, but also, it's something that I need to do in order to resolve whatever situation, otherwise, it can only grow worse.

This is basically me.

I also do not talk well when really stressed, either, even if it is at home. So what if I'm not selectively mute and simply can't because of stress and confusion outside of the home? I don't know. Where does autism end?

I don't think anybody chooses not to talk. Selective mutism makes it seem like you selectively chose when to talk but that isn't how it happens.

Oh and I should note in reaction to the OP that yes there are people diagnosed with AS who can't talk at all. Usually as a result of the same movement disorder I have, or who are diagnosed with AS kind of sloppily because they spoke early but nobody checked to see if their speech was noncommunicative or atypical in a number of ways that technically rule out AS.

You're right. Selective mutism is not a choice. I remember wanting to break out of it. I would have conversations with the person in front of me in my head.
I'm not sure if it was just an autism thing. I wasn't really interested in people. I don't remember having anxiety. Sure I was shy but I wasn't panicky. I didn't speak much between 5-14. Well I didn't talk much before 4 but I wasn't really exposed to the world. And it took another five years after I began to speak to speak a bit more.
It's kind of weird now because I can not speak or speak too much around people.

If I haven't actually had selective mutism, I've been pretty close to that, both as a child and an adult. I'm not sure the OP is talking about selective mutism or not though.

I know I've got upset and said I hated talking at least a few times because it felt frustrating and my sentences come out weird.


anbuend wrote~

Do you have a link on "atypical speech" or communication?

Not off the top of my head, but I'm talking about things like echolalia, pronoun reversal, and things like that (which the research criteria at least say should lean the diagnosis away from AS towards other kinds of autism) and speech that, however it sounds, isn't communicative (can be somewhat harder to spot, but a speech pathologist was able to tease out the difference even when I was 19).

I think the OP means non-verbal autistics. There are some with apraxia; capable of no speech. Some that speak only in echololia or short phrases or noises.
I'm kind of slightly above that. It's very hard for me to speak fluently. Maybe I spend way too many years being silent or that it's a motor dysfunction that affects the way speech comes out of my mouth. It's also a brain thing where what I think and what I say aren't always the same thing.

Total lack of speech can also be for cognitive reasons. I'm currently either completely non-speaking for cognitive and/or motor reasons, or other times echolalic. I used to also have almost-fluent-sounding (weird locations of gaps and pauses) noncommunicative speech but that's gone by now.

What I was talking about with people dxed with AS was that if their initial speech had those particular problems it could eventually devolve into lack of speech, especially with autistic catatonia tacked on. I know several people dxed as AS due to early speech who are nonspeaking now.