A 42-year-old woman arrived at an emergency department after her family reported that she had suddenly stopped speaking and was eating nothing but brown rice. For more than two weeks, her doctors worked through one of psychiatry's most serious possibilities, catatonia. The answer turned out to be far less familiar: she had chosen to stop talking.
A team from Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, including psychiatrists Gregory Noe and Sahil Munjal, described the case in a report in the Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders, published online August 6, 2026. The authors call volitional mutism a rare diagnosis and write that, to their knowledge, only one other case has been described in the medical literature: a Nepalese soldier who stopped speaking and then talked spontaneously when doctors engaged him about his home country.
