Suzanne, 14, is at first sight a teenager like the others, with her three sisters, but as soon as she leaves her home in Tréguier, in the Côtes-d’Armor, the young girl can no longer speak. Marion tells the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Saturday” (replay): “At the end of kindergarten, the school nurse told me that my child could not speak. I replied that I had a child who had spoken since she was one year old, and we talk a lot at home She replied that the teachers never heard the sound of her voice…”
“We went to see a lady who said to her: ‘You don’t want to say hello to people? It doesn’t matter, you wave to them with your hand. And it will be fine. ‘ Yeah so in the second session she spoke to the nice lady who told me my was fine and it was going to be fine and we left it at that but it stuck in sixth where we change teachers all the time, it’s a new environment. It was complicated at school. And then, a neighbor told me that it had a name. It’s selective mutism which means that we are mute but not with everyone. We behave a little atypical socially but not with everyone…”
“Not speaking, not moving, shutting everything down and remaining neutral lowers stress levels”
“We don’t really know why, but these are children who have a very high stress level. And when they are very young at school and we put them in a class where you no longer have to move, be silent … it petrifies them. So, not talking, not moving, shutting everything down and remaining neutral actually lowers the stress level. I like this version that says there is no original cause. Indeed , she lived like her sisters [avec qui elle parle et joue]. We see it the same. There is zero difference with the others.”
“Silence like that is something that dissipates as you grow up, for which we find solutions. And for it to get loose, it takes a lot of time, only benevolence and great freedom. time to invent herself as she can invent herself…” Suzanne does not want to remain a prisoner of this silence and has made music her therapy, the means of communicating with others. With her harp, she tells herself through her songs which she performs on stage under her artist name Syou.
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