_________________________________________________________________ Autism FAQ - Mailing List, Archives, FAQ Memo, Web Page & Online Information _________________________________________________________________ The AUTISM Mailing List The AUTISM Mailing List ([email protected]) is an open e-mail-based forum to discuss autism hosted by St. Johns University, and administered by Ray Kopp ([email protected]). It includes parents, autistic people, researchers, professionals, students, and other people interested in autism. Discussion is lively: many weeks see 500 or more postings. It is a very good forum for posing a question for which you do not know who would have the answer. There is a FAQ memo specifically about the list at http://web.syr.edu/~rjkopp/autismlistfaq.html The mailing list is administered by the software, LISTSERV, which gives you the ability to subscribe, sign off, get past messages, stop mail during vacations, get the mail in a digest, and other things, all without the necessity of asking someone to do it for you. You can get instructions in how to do these things by sending the text "help" to the address [email protected]. Here are brief instructions for some of the more common requests it can handle: Subscribing to the list Send the text "subscribe autism Firstname Lastname" (i.e., with your first name and last name) as the first line of an e-mail message to [email protected]. LISTSERV will reply with a confirmation request including its own instructions. Once you are subscribed, you will receive all mail sent to [email protected], and any mail you send to that address will be sent to all the members of the AUTISM mailing list. Signing off of the list Send the text "signoff autism" as the first line of an e-mail message to [email protected]. Receiving the postings in digests Once you are subscribed, you can adjust LISTSERV to send the postings to you as one long message per day instead of the usual one hundred or more. To set this up, send the text "set autism digest" to [email protected]. Note: do not send requests to subscribe or sign off to the list itself. This practice results in thousands of people getting lots of extra messages. Be careful to send LISTSERV commands to LISTSERV, or contact the folks who run the list. Who to e-mail about issues relating to the AUTISM mailing list If you have a question about autism, you can join the list and ask it to the list members. If you need to contact someone about an issue with the list itself, you can contact the list administator, Ray Kopp ([email protected]). AUTISM Mailing List Archives The LISTSERV software keeps an archive of all the messages ever posted to the AUTISM Mailing List, and you can make it search and retrieve messages from the archive. To search the archive via the web, open: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/autism.html To search the archives through e-mail (if you have no web access), send an e-mail message to [email protected] with a "search" command as the body of your message such as the single line: search 'greenspan' in autism LISTSERV will return a list of all postings that match your search command, giving a number for each posting which you can use to retrieve it. In this example it returns all postings to autism since it started which contain the string greenspan anywhere in their body. You can further narrow your search by time, sender, or subject of the postings. Here are 3 example search commands: search 'greenspan' in autism since 96/7/24 search 'greenspan' in autism where sender contains 'smith' search * in autism where subject contains 'intro' In the first example LISTSERV lists all postings that have the word greenspan anywhere in their body and were posted to the autism list since July 24, 1996. In the second example LISTSERV lists all postings containing the word greenspan in their body that were ever posted to the autism list and had smith anywhere in the "From:" mail header line. In the third example the asterisk (*) means to list all postings which contain the word intro anywhere in their subject header. Once you receive the list of matching postings from LISTSERV you review this list and decide which if any you want to receive. Each posting listed will have a number in the left most column that is used to identify the posting to LISTSERV. To receive several of the postings listed you must send another message to LISTSERV using the "getpost" command to request the postings you want LISTSERV to return. For example if you requested a list of postings using the "search" command and decided that you want postings numbered 153, 756, 757, 758, and 1821 then you would send a message back to [email protected] with this single line as the body of your message: getpost autism 153 756 757 758 1821 Since you want three sequential postings 756, 757, and 758 you can indicate them as a range in your "getpost" command like this: getpost autism 153 756-758 1821 LISTSERV will return the postings you requested combined into a single return message. If you want to get all postings posted since February 12, 1997 you could send [email protected] this line as a message: search * in autism since 97/2/12 When LISTSERV returns the list of postings look at the first and last entries in the list and see what their ID numbers are. For example they could be 3244 and 3585. If so then send back to LISTSERV another message using those ID numbers as the start and end of a range of postings for it to return. For example: getpost autism 3244-3585 Other Mailing lists See section "Initiatives" below about ANI-L, and other lists. Frequently Asked Questions Memo (this memo) An introduction to autism to answer questions that people frequently have about it. The memo began in early 1993 and has grown as of late 1998 to over 7500 lines of text. The material is largely factual material posted, sometimes repeatedly, on mailing lists that discuss autism. If people ask about it, it belongs here. Web address of FAQ Memo: http://www.autism-resources.com/autism.faq.html Other versions of this memo are available. In one, recent changes to the memo are marked; in the other, the memo is broken into smaller pages of 500 lines each for people with web browsers that cannot handle 3000+ lines. Both of these are at the "Autism Resources" web site, specifically through the page with URL: http://www.autism-resources.com/faqformats.html What this FAQ memo is and what it isn't The nature and treatment of Autism remains sufficiently controversial that in order for a FAQ memo to avoid giving you just one viewpoint, it cannot answer the difficult question: "which treatment really works". And the FAQ memo certainly doesn't give medical advice. What a FAQ memo does is document facts such as definition of terms, references to books, organizations, and treatment programs, even "who is saying what about what"; essentially, background material both to help you understand what is being said in the online discussions, in books, in talking with professionals, and in understanding what people are saying when they tell you about the best methods. The FAQ memo avoids making judgements about treatments (with one big exception: it gives no credence to the idea popular in the 1950s that Autism is caused by poor parenting), but this in itself skews its message: by documenting the most unlikely treatments along with the mainstream ones, it can induce the reader to give them undue credit. Please keep this in mind. Also, the FAQ memo is certainly imperfect both in its accuracy and its avoidence of opinion. But it is constantly improved through the suggestions and corrections of its readers. Web Page & Other Online Information In general, this FAQ memo does not list online resources: rather than fill this memo with URLs for you to type in, I have assembled them in one convenient web page to compliment this memo. The web page (which includes this FAQ Memo) is called "Autism Resources" and is at: http://www.autism-resources.com/ -- L'homme qui s'est fait mal.