Hi, there,I might suggest looking at it this way... stress can make any illness seem worse and make the symptoms seem more obvious... the same would apply to stress and Parkinson's Disease, Essential Tremor, etc. of course, the symptoms will be exacerbated. Same would go for a cancer patient struggling to recover from chemotherapy who is stressed, losing sleep, and finding it harder to recover. They'll have a harder time. But it has no relationship to the underlying cause.
You might drive yourself crazy if you think complete calmness and stress management will resolve the SD or that SD is anxiety related. For better or for worse, it isn't. Unfortunately, it will not go away by treating anxiety.
Some people report that medications help their voice and that can be because they act on the central nervous system (not so much that they are quelling the anxiety)... Alcohol has a similar effect. They are all muscle relaxants. Botox relaxes the muscles as well... leading to its effectiveness. It makes the neurologically induced spasms unable to get through to the muscles that control the vocal folds. The muscles simply become too weak to spasm.
So whether you decide on treatment or not, don't make your anxiety and stress even worse thinking you can fix your voice by calming down.
Some SD patients also report they can sing better than they can speak... while others still notice the vocal tremor may still be present (if they have an additional dystonic or essential vocal tremor) when they sustain individual notes. Different muscles may be involved in singing than in day-to-day conversational speaking which is the voice most commonly impacted by SD.
Like you said at the outset of your message: 1) your voice routinely failed and THEN 2) you developed social anxiety. That is, the anxiety was a reaction to the SD, not the cause of it.
All in all, just keep in mind that anyone can argue that most everything is made worse by anxiety. But there's nothing "unique" about stress and SD (versus stress and Parkinson's disease) that makes it a stress-related disorder any more than any other condition.
It can be hopeful to hold too much onto the stress/psych related argument as then one can hope there is a cure/resolution. i.e., "If only I could ..... then my symptoms would disappear." Unfortunately, that's not the case with SD.
Some focal dystonias have also been found to have a genetic component... that is, those with SD have a higher rate of other focal dystonias in their family than the general population... so, for example, if someone with SD has a sister with blepharospasm... it'd be a hard sell to argue that stress caused the SD in one person and the forced eye closure in the other!
Good luck. Don't beat yourself up over the diagnosis. Choose to treat it or not, but it's not your fault and never will be. There is so much support out there for SD these days regardless of what type of treatment (or no treatment) you use. That in itself can make living with SD much more manageable.
Good luck,
Laurie
