Minecraft is helping children with autism make new friends (2016)

The vast majority of hearing people have no interest in learning sign-language unless they are related to a deaf person. You are, in a sense, a perenial foreigner in your own land, surrounded by people who you cannot communicate freely with and never will be able to (unlike a migrant who can learn the language). So you form communities with other deaf people with who you can communicate freely. Deaf culture has become something more distinct than simply a community of people with a shared experience within a wider culture, it's much more isolated.

Obviously hearing loss is on a spectrum, with varying levels of remediation available from aids and implants to lip-reading and speech training so the above is a generalisation. But especially for adults, things like implants are not a panacea, you don't suddenly hear perfectly. I have a friend who uses a combination of an implant and an aid, but talking with him still requires continuous extra thought and consideration to make sure he can follow me, and that I can understand his speech. A noisy pub or a free-flowing multi-person conversation with everyone butting in is still incredibly isolating for him.

The internet has changed a lot of this from what I've been told, with so much culture being online and in text, deaf people are able to interract with hearing people much more often and freely (and on equal terms) far more often, even if they have many of the same issues IRL that they have always had. But the seperation remains, and it's mostly a result of the hearing world's almost total lack of consideration or effort to accomodate (see the absense of a sign-language interpreter for UK government announcements as an example).

Additionally the deaf community has every reason to be skeptical of a cure because many so-called cures come with massive caveats. For example Cochlear implants are often seen as a magical cure for deafness but there are many reports from formerly deaf people of experiencing intense discomfort if they gain any meaningful hearing from them at all. But due to the existence of these "cures" non-deaf people are more likely to treat deafness as a choice and affordances for deaf people as unimportant - similar to how according to some studies bicyclists are treated with less care by drivers when visibly wearing helmets.

Autistic rights advocates don't argue against medication or treatment for autistic individuals who want that. We advocate against a universalist approach that assumes that autism is fundamentally something to be avoided regardless of how high/low functioning the individual is, and independent of whether the difficulties for an individual are stemming from something inherent to the condition or whether they're coming from a lack of accommodation.

Many autistic people view the way they look at the world as a fundamental part of who they are. It is offensive to them to be told that they shouldn't exist.

Of course, more severe, low-functioning individuals can and often do disagree with that assessment of themselves, and that's fine, and those individuals should be given the help they want. But let's be honest here, nobody in the "autism speaks" branch of activism talks about a cure for specifically low-functioning autism; they talk about a cure for autism in general, they talk about eliminating autism from everyone across the board. And if you view autism as an inherent part of your personality, it's pretty understandable why you might start to suspect that those people are hostile to you as a person.

It's valid for autistic people to object to the characterization of autism as a universally negative condition that they just "don't have as bad". It's also valid to object to neurotypicals drawing the line between autism as an identity and autism as a debilitating condition based purely on what behaviors are inconvenient to those neurotypicals, rather than what the internal experiences are for autistic people themselves. Autistic rights advocates argue that autism can (and often is) a real disability with real negative effects, but also that a lack of accommodation can exasperate some of the negative effects of autism, and that it's important for society to think more critically about when and why these negative effects happen and how to best alleviate them. Autism rights advocates argue that inconvenience or incompatibility with existing neurotypical workflows are not universally reasons to call someone broken, even though functioning in a modern society might require interventions or medication to help manage those incompatibilities even in high-functioning individuals.

But of course we should try to help people with debilitating autism, and of course we should allow people who want to suppress or eliminate parts of that condition to do so. It's just that it's really messy to act like autistic people are secretly normal people who have some kind of disease that's keeping them from being normal. That "disease" can't be easily separated from identity.

Anti-autism is like arguing that because some people have PTSD or trauma or depression, that we need a universal cure for emotions, and that anyone who suggests "sometimes even inconvenient emotions are a good thing" is ignoring the entire gambit of suffering that emotions can cause. It's ridiculous.

Autistic kids generally don't bang their heads against walls for "a good time". It's a form of stimming and it's intensified by certain situations or interactions. The desirable approach would not be to prevent the kid from stimming (which can cause them massive additional stress and even trauma) but instead offer them a safer alternative that is less likely to cause them injury.

But allistics (non-autistics) tend to be annoyed by autistics stimming at all, so often it comes down to whether autistics are able to "mask" and suppress their more obvious traits (even if it causes persistent stress) or not.

“Something happening”… or “adults deciding things while ignoring the needs and desires of the children”? Most of these situations follow a pattern, in my experience:

• Society decides what things may matter and what things may not.

• Adult unilaterally changes things that It Is Unreasonable To Care About.

• Child is not allowed to care about them.

• Child is not allowed to object.

• Child is not allowed to be distracted by the change from What The Child Must Pay Attention To.

• Child must pay attention, immediately, and cease this ridiculous behaviour.

• Child “has a tantrum” (a word that does not distinguish between “deliberate disruption as a protest / spiteful action”, “inability to contain frustration / anger” and “meltdown”).

> Mental disorders are bad by definition. Psychologists don't put behaviours in their diagnostic manuals for nothing.

I never claimed that they did, and you're not addressing what I've said.

> I suggest you go read through the DSM.

I suggest you have a little look at DSM II's “302” section.

> This category is for individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward objects other than people of the opposite sex,

“hampered in their function” requires you to define “function”, and that's usually defined as “ability to fit into society's little box”. While we've made the box a bit bigger (when we don't have to put much effort into it), plenty of benign-of-themselves variations in what people are like are still outside that box, and still punished unnecessarily.

If cyanide was a regular ingredient in food, people with normal levels of mitochondrial rhodanese would be “hampered in their function” – they wouldn't be able to eat even a tenth of the cyanide-containing food a normal person could eat without straight-up dying! You or I would therefore have a disability that just doesn't exist in our society, without any change having occurred to us.

Within the school system, which forces them to do so in the adults' way. Interesting that this “unsuitability to any task that involves a group of other children” tends to show up when the children aren't allowed to self-organise; in environments where children get to choose their own games, most autistic children are perfectly fine playing with their friends.

The problem comes when you try to force them to do things the way you want them to, and they find that difficult or don't want to. This is not the children's problem; this is adults on power trips.

You know the best teacher I ever had? The Reception and Year One teacher who distinguished between children and adults by whether they went to her school; who made me cross twice (justifiably cross, once); who would have children ask her to resolve disputes when they couldn't resolve them themselves; who gave the Year Sixes a budget and a catalogue and let them order the playground equipment; who talked to me about educational psychology and Game of Thrones when I was ten; whose class always (well, 99%) lined up at the end of playtime within 20 seconds, and patiently waited for an average of several minutes (I counted) for everyone else to line up; who was respected second only to the head teacher (who people were a bit scared of because he was the head teacher); who shouted perhaps four times I'm aware of, and never at her class because they were already paying attention to her; who never had any problems with “disruption” from the autistic kids (only from the biters, and the mute girl who kept hitting people).

Pretty sure she was autistic, too (if I remember one of our conversations right). Funny how that works out.

> I'd like to emphasize though that I meant the schooling issue as one of the many examples you could pick where autistic people are both at a disadvantage and are a detriment to the group.

I'm sorry, I'm not aware of any examples where autistic people are “a detriment to the group”. You'll have to provide them, I'm afraid.

Diagnosis of autism requires running through a checklist as part of an interview, or a behavioural analysis if younger. If you're completely non-verbal and thus incapable of being interviewed you can still be shortcut diagnosed as autistic, which is actually my entire point, the behavioural checklist is not that stringent. A number of severe learning disabilities can pretty easily be swung into an autism diagnosis, making the spectrum seem more like 20 conditions we can't distinguish rather than 1 condition with vastly differing presentations.