apparently we r doing this again
Selective Mutism: an anxiety disorder. The inability to talk is caused by social anxiety due to the people and/or situation around the selectively mute individual. Often starts in childhood.
Speech Loss: a term for being unable to speak for a certain period of time, usually due to autism-related reasons (e.g. being overwhelmed or burnt out). Can overlap with Selective Mutism, the disorder, but it is not the same thing. (For one, SL is a trait; SM is a whole disorder.)
Nonverbal/Nonspeaking: a term for people who are always or almost always unable to talk. If you're unable to talk for an hour/day/week, you're not "going nonverbal"; you're "losing speech". If you've never been able to talk more than a few utterances, that's nonverbal.
Semiverbal/Semispeaking: a term for people who struggle greatly to speak to communicate. This might include taking awhile to form sentences, speaking with very few words, relying on echolalia, using gestures to communicate, and not always making sense to others.
Hyperverbal: people who speak more than what's typical, though we can still experience speech loss. This can include things like having a large vocabulary, using more words than necessary/usual to say something, talking to ourselves, talking for the sake of talking, using a lot of non-communicative echolalia, not realizing we're talking, or rambling often.
A Note: over time, your place on the verbalizing spectrum (nonverbal, semiverbal, average, hyperverbal) CAN change, but that's not, like, "oh i was hyperverbal this week and nonverbal last week"; it's about overarching patterns. Additionally, Selective Mutism does not inherently put someone at a certain spot on the verbalizing spectrum.
