Marilyn...what a suprise

     I recently watched the movie "My Week with Marilyn" starring Michelle Williams, most of you have probably heard of it or seen it. Michelle Williams got an Oscar nod for her performance of Marilyn Monroe based on two books by Colin Clark. What's relevent for me about this is how interested I quickly became on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Never before did I pay much notice to her life. In fact she died in 1962 many years before my birth but what struck me in the film was all the mental illness that plaqued her.
   The film pushed me to run out and get the best reviewed biography to date on Marilyn Monroe, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, written by J. Randy Taraborrelli. I haven't been able to put it down (except of course to study for finals.). So why does she interest me? As stated earlier it's her mental illness that made her so vulnurable and mysterious that on my further "investigation" makes her a legend. Of course she was beautiful, that's clear but it wasn't her beauty. That doens't impress me, although she used her beauty to her full advantage. It's that she managed to pull herself up the ladder with for the most part a full blown mental illness that (at the point in the book that I'm at) was never properly diagnosed. Her mother and grandmother as well suffered,  her mother Gladys who was in and out of state hospitals for depression and various other mental illness epidodes.
    Again, I go back to my own life as most of us do when something touches us. Both Marilyn's grandmother and mother appeared to have had postpartum depression which if not diagnosed and treated can turn into major depressive disorder. My own mother has mental illness as well as some other family members. I myself suffered from postpartum depression from my second child on, I knew enough about what was going on with myself; since as stated many times in my blog women's health has always been an important subject for me and prior to nursing school I read everything I could get my hands on regarding pregnany, birth, and the postpartum period.
   What is endearing to me about Marilyn or maybe I should say what I connect to is how much I can relate to her childhood experiences. Of course I have no idea what her fame felt like, I can appreciate if not feel a total bond with her over our similar experiences. Mental illness needs to be viewed as much more than someone feeling a bit sad. It can ruin lives, not just the one afflicted but a whole family. Some how our county needs to look over our whole mental health system. People get lost in the shuffle of the cost of health care, kids get lost because when they look into their parent's eyes and all they see is darkness. It's a domino affect as well as a biological one. Clearly, we can see that when we look at Marilyn Monroe's family line.Just food for thought....