Posted by baseball55 on January 15, 2016, at 19:38:25
Just finished reading Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates. You had written earlier about it being an indictment of psychiatry. Did I miss something? There was no mention of her seeing a psychiatrist until the very end and that for analysis (at the same time, she saw psychics, a personal trainer, a masseuse). But it also portrays her as seeing multiple doctors (not psychiatrists, I imagine) and getting multiple prescriptions without telling them about the other scrips she had. Also filling the scrips at multiple pharmacies so nobody would know how much she had. Further, her drug use, in the book, was fed initially by the studio doctors who would pump her with benzedrine and seconal to keep her performing. There is no indication that the studio doctors were psychiatrists.
In any case, the ending suggests that she did not, in fact, overdose and kill herself. I won't say what happened, lest I give away the ending if someone else wants to read the book.
Or is it the mother you were writing about? In the book, the mother tries to kill her daughter and burn down her apartment building and is committed to a state hospital and has ECT treatments. Probably not true, given what I looked up about Monroe's real life, but even if it were, she did try to murder her child. Today, she'd spend the rest of her life in prison.
In any case, this is a work of fiction. Some if it is sort of true and loosely based on Monroe's life. Some of it is purely imagined.
poster:baseball55
thread:1085441
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20151225/msgs/1085441.html