Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

faeriechangling

I think it's how people go about it.

Autism is literally defined by a deficit in social skills + restricted repetitive behaviours and nothing else so that is basically what gets treated - the symptoms gets treated with behaviourism and the underlying causes of that behaviour are ignored. GI problems are comorbid in like ~40% of autism cases. Do schools stress getting these autistic kids exercising and teaching them how to cook healthy meals so they can overcome these struggles, live a life without pain, so they can not only live a higher quality of life but have an easier and more pleasant time being social? Sometimes - but the overwhelming emphasis is simply making them act more normal in a very simplistic and direct and to the point way. The system isn't designed to improve autistic kids quality of life you see, it's designed to make them less troublesome for the people around them, and hold them accountable for the trouble they're causing, that's people's mindset.

There is a very cold and unemphathetic attitude towards autistic kids where they're just expected to be iron willed stoics who behave using a fake personality that pleases others around them while their underlying issues basically get no attention from the system. I think if autistic people were treated with more empathy, as less of a monolith, as being defined as being more than "social deficits + repetitive behaviours", we would go a long way.

I hesitate. I do see your point, but I find it maybe short sighted: see, pleasing other is self-serving, the more you please them the more they adapt to you. There is an advantage in making others enjoy your existence more, and if we're going to actually help, embracing what societies are, machines crushing difference for a reductive common compromise, teaching autists to pretend to play the game is going to work better than teaching current winners that they should lose a bit to help autists feel better.

I suppose our disagreement might be in how feasible each is: it is easy, maybe lazy, to try to make autists adapt to the rest of us and probably impossible, at best extremely expensive, to make the rest of us more atuned to their needs. Not that we dont want to, but we're all thermodynamics machines trying to save energy: we may never really massively expense some to their benefit, sadly, especially if they dont learn to go our ways, sometimes.

According to the CDC, 52% of schools exempted students with cognitive disability, and 86% exempted students with long-term physical and medical disability from physical education[1].

You talk about what I'm saying being short-sighted because of "extreme expense" and "massive expense", and how society serves to "Crush difference". I call absolute horseshit. Schools spend MORE on the physical education of normal students than they do with the majority of their disabled students. They do NOT crush difference, they alienate their disabled students from the rest of the student body. They discriminate against them, they make them sick though idleness, they set them up for failure, and when they fail to pretend to play the game it's all blamed on their sick minds and weak bodies. It's not the schools fault of course, it's that these students are such freaks that the school is blameless for them failing. Of course kids who don't exercise are failing socially - not exercising makes you ugly, mentally unwell, markedly different from the other kids, and culturally disconnected - if they gave a fuck about autistic kids social functioning they would make them exercise but they don't care.

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/physicalactivity/inclusio...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com