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difficult keeping the faith was, had collapsed under the stress and strain and now began to cry uncontrollably. The English couple who lived in her house swiftly called an ambulance. Because Gladys showed no physical trauma and was reported by the couple to have been depressed for some time, and was still crying and disoriented, the ambulance took her to Norwalk Hospital, the same place her mother had spent her last nineteen days on earth.
    After school Norma Jeane was met by the English couple, who explained what had happened to her mother that day. Once again separation and instability rocked Norma’s world, just as she was getting used to living with her real mother for the first time—what would happen to her? Would they send her back to the Bolenders? Or would she stay with the English family in her mother’s house? She became fearful when she wondered what might happen to her mother. Would she die because of her illness? Was it her hard work and sacrifice for Norma Jeane’s care that made her ill? Was she the cause of all her mother’s problems? Norma Jeane would never resolve her guilt for “causing” her mother’s misfortune. A singular theme of personal tragedy, self-guilt, and blame characterized three generations of mothers and daughters. As her dreams of togetherness instantly evaporated, Norma Jeane remembered her imaginary father warning her to be a good girl and not to cry and upset her mother any more. She paid attention and didn’t cry.
    The Norwalk staff listened to Gladys’s ravings of discontent and diagnosed her as a woman with severe depression. The State Lunacy Commission that ran Norwalk Hospital began in 1916 with a 105-bed facility. As is true today, once a patient is diagnosed with mental illness, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of the stigma. Few are rediagnosed. The State Lunacy Board’s policy was simple: once branded a lunatic, always a lunatic.
    Unfortunately, in the 1930s, chloral hydrate and barbiturates were popular in the treatment of both mania and depression. Various physical treatments for the mentally ill were hysterectomy, castration, and removal of various “thought to be infected” organs. Hydrotherapy required patients to stand in a cold shower for long periods of time. The various shock therapies prospered as well, such as spinning patients around on a horizontal wheel.
    Gladys was told by psychiatrists that her mental illness was inherited from her mother and that her breakdown was assumed to be like her mother’s. The misconceptions of insanity and depression in particular were applied in Gladys’s treatment with the use of chloral hydrate, a sedative, and phenobarbitol, a barbiturate. Gladys’s system was already full of toxins from chronic inhalation and exposure to a number of hazardous substances. Carbon tetrachloride and 1,1,1-trichloralethane, chemicals Gladys worked with daily, are now known to be poisonous. Concentrations of 1,000-1,700 parts per million, which Gladys was breathing each day, cause headaches, disequilibrium, depression, and even coma. A low-oxygen condition called cerebral hypoxia can result from long periods of exposure. To compound the depression caused by chemical exposure, Gladys was prescribed more depressants, which had the synergistic effect of causing irreversible pathological damage, thus ensuring that Gladys would be permanently institutionalized. Like her mother before her, she was a victim of the mental-health system. Norma Jeane would soon suffer the consequences.

3
    Puberty
    T ime and time again Norma Jeane’s heart was broken by her mother. The dream of a secure home life was dashed by this latest turn of events. Illness seemed like a legitimate excuse for her mother’s absence, yet Aunt Grace McKee would cringe every time the child would ask, “When will I see my mother again?” Grace tried to keep her with the British couple and their daughter, but