I’m signed up to an autism based email report which (supposedly) gathers all the relevant news about autism from all over the world and emails it to recipients along with a bit of commentary and reader input. Its a great format but unfortunately the person running it has become fixated on Mercury. This is a shame as there’s a lot more to talk about in the field of autism than just endless unsubstantiated repetition.
I thought to myself how much I’d like to see a regular email newsletter that covered a wider range of autism related subjects than just Mercury. And then I thought I may as well _do_ it myself. So I will.
I’ve decided to call it RepAut as a play on words with ‘report’ (hilarious eh?) and I hope that autistics, as well as parents/siblings will participate – I want this to reflect the _actual_ autism community, not just parents. I also hope that people who’s lives are entirely untouched by autism except insofar as they read this blog might want to sign up out of interest and a chance to learn more about autism.
You can sign up at the imaginatively titled sign up page.
Sign up is as easy as clicking the link above, entering your email address, choosing ‘subscribe’ and hitting the ‘go’ button. If you get bored in a few weeks time and don’t want to recieve it anymore, go back to the same page, enter the same email address, choose _un_subscribe and click ‘go’ – hey presto, you’re off the list.
Please don’t wory about me selling your email addresses to some evil spammer. Getting on for 99% of my personal mail is spam these days so I have a deep seated hatred of all things spammy – I wouldn’t be so cruel as to inflict more spam on anyone.
Left Brain Right Brain 
“Its a great format but unfortunately the person running it has become fixated on Mercury.”
I think the RepAut is a fantastic idea. I do hope that the above doesn’t apply to your newsletter though.
I agree with almost everything you say about the Mercury=Autism crowd, and realise the importance of advocating against chelation (especially in light of the latest tragedy).
However, I’m much more interested in education issues, developmental stuff (the 90% can speak by the age of 9 stat is one I hadn’t seen before and gave me great hope), …. etc. Personally I’d like to see more of that and less of the “don’t chelate your child!”
I look forward to seeing the first issue. Keep up the good work.
Cheers,
Andrew
Hey!
I’ve thought about someone doing a newsletter like that to relieve the need to use the other mercury politics guy’s newsletter. A person can get much of what he has by subscribing to a feed from pubmed.gov plus google news, which can be customized…
But now, here you’ve gone and done it even better.
Thank you, thank you.
I hope lots of people unsub to the other guy’s newsletter.
Did I say, “thank you”?
Hrm. Okay. I’m not a fan of mailing lists (I greatly prefer discussion boards; I can manage threads much better that way), but I guess I’ll have to blow the dust off my gmail account and sign up (I understand gmail’s interface can keep track of threads and such, and I may as well use it for something, right?).
I don’t think this is a list. It’s just Kevin collecting news in one place and mailing it to whomever (whoever?) wants it. He doesn’t want to hear from us. 🙂 Well, not all the time anyway.
Camille’s right Bonni – I’d definitely be interested in recieving comments/letters/feedback which I’d publish but the majority of it will be an email newsletter rather than an emaillist.
I’ve signed up Kev!
Hope all your little ones are doing well.
xxxx
Got my second RepAut report. Now I usually do not think of my son with the communication disorder as being autistic… but lately I’ve had my doubts.
Ah HAH! Now it seems that teenagers go through an “autistic” phase:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1565852,00.html
Well, that pretty much explains my teenage boys (and sometimes my husband… the one who will say exactly the _wrong_ thing trying to calm me down!).
My oldest does have a verbal communication disorder, so it is sticking with him longer (he spent his elementary years as the very nice sweet kid who had a smile for everyone and was very helpful… the child who was known for helping kids when they dropped their books). Now he is trying to catch up… learning how to fit into high school while still stuck in middle school emotionally.
Ah… but my younger boy! He is “cool”. He goes to school with a black jacket even though the weather is still balmy. He says if “you look cool, you are cool!”. Well, he is off this evening to a band camp. While he and his best buddies were waiting to get on the bus I caught a bit of their conversation. They were trying to figure out why a particular girl was just not interested in one of them! Ah, the confusion over figuring out women starts early (okay, they are 14 and 15… still young by this mom’s calendar!).
Also, we do not have a program with the “Kevin” teenager described in the news articles, yet. But there is a comic strip that I check in on every day about dealing with a teenage boy:
http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/zits/about.htm