charentonasylum's Journal

This community is for those that realize that they are not their diagnosis; those that are not afraid to say they’ve been in the loony bin and not a mental rehab center. For the people that have been in the system for ages, and those that are just starting. This is not a place to be politically correct, screw what NAMI and NIMH say we are… let’s just be WHO we are. This is a community to laugh in, to be pissed off in, to be depressed in… for support, to get things off your chest.

This is an open membership, friends only community. To join, all you have to do is click here. Please keep in mind that you have to list the community as a friend to have it show on your friend's page, it will not do this automatically.

Some things to keep in mind:

* Stay on topic... quiz results, spam, and generic surveys will be automatically deleted, keep it for your personal journal.

* Pictures, art work, etc that help you express your issues and/or emotional state are welcome. Links to news stories, relevant sites and lj communities are also welcome. (Please use lj cut for larger pictures.)

* Play nice. We are here to support each other, not poke fun and belittle. If you choose to flame, I will kick you out with no hesitation.

* Entries about self injury are ok, please place them behind an lj cut with a warning for the rest of the members in the community

* Religion can be very important when coping with a mental illness, I respect this. Please respect the fact that not everyone subscribes to the same faith.

* If you have question about posting in a community journal, editing your entries in the community, etc please consult the lj community FAQ before emailing or posting your question.


With all that said, I hope you enjoy your stay here. If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

- shadowviolet, moderator

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Charenton is the asylum the Marquis de Sade spent the last ten years of his life. He wrote several books, and many plays while there. The director of the asylum had a theatre built as a thereaputic exercise for his patients. The plays became the chic thing for parisian upper class, to go watch the loonies.

Some more info from here :

The manuscripts are both of plays, and both were written by de Sade during his final incarceration in the Charenton asylum, where he spent the last eleven years of his life (1803–1814). Feeling that the drama could actually be used as a form of psychotherapy, and that the opportunity for the inmates to participate in producing and acting in plays would be beneficial to their illnesses, de Sade became the maître de théatre to a company of inmates, and the plays which they put on attracted large audiences of doctors, village notables, and inmates. Hippolyte de Colins, who edited an unpublished de Sade journal in 1970, has written: “Both scientists and the ignorant wanted to attend the spectacles given by the insane of Charenton. All of Paris flocked there for several years; some out of curiosity, others to judge of the prodigious effects of these admirable means of curing the insane.” -----
Roulhac de Maupas, the director of Charenton, commented in a letter written to the French minister of the interior on de Sade’s use of a copyist, and this letter is quoted by Apollinaire in his 1909 preface to an edition of de Sade’s works: “I have learned that he has hired one of them [the inmates], an honest but simple man, to copy and have copies made by other inmates . . . different theatrical pieces of his own composition.” De Sade has extensively revised and corrected both plays in his own hand, however, and these revisions are particularly numerous in Le prévaricateur, which includes five full pages in the author’s autograph.

Thanks goes to amentiturtle for the info.