Curious Femme

Introduction

Marilyn Monroe has been written about more than almost any woman of the twentieth century. She has been framed as victim, genius, puppet, addict, manipulator, icon, saviour and symptom. For more than sixty years, biographers and psychiatrists alike have returned to her medical records and her demeanour to classify what was supposedly wrong with her mind. The dominant view throughout her lifetime was that she suffered from a mood disorder. She was labelled manic-depressive, unstable, emotionally immature, addicted to attention, impulsive, borderline. These labels were not neutral medical descriptions. They were products of an era in which female distress was not investigated so much as named and contained.

In the twenty-first century a different interpretive framework is possible. Modern research into complex trauma, childhood adversity and the under-recognition of autism in women has opened an analytical window that was not available to the men who treated, contained and wrote about Monroe in her lifetime. When her life is re-examined in light of contemporary knowledge about C-PTSD, masking, sensory sensitivity, female-pattern autism and developmental trauma from disrupted attachment, a striking pattern emerges. The historic psychiatric labels assigned to Monroe were institutionally convenient rather than clinically rigorous. Her behaviour makes more consistent sense when understood as the product of untreated childhood trauma combined with a neurodivergent cognitive and sensory profile that would not have been recognised or named in the 1950s.

The argument is not that Monroe can be confidently or clinically diagnosed from the grave. Retrospective diagnosis is inherently limited. The argument is that the interpretive framework we apply matters. It matters because Monroe’s case is not just about her but about the apparatus that names women. The question is not only whether Monroe was autistic or traumatised. The question is what it means that she was read as pathological rather than injured, hysterical rather than autistic, self-destructive rather than dysregulated by the conditions that produced her. To re-read Monroe is, indirectly, to re-read the mental health history of women.

Background: Childhood Conditions, Adult Presentation and the Logic of Misreading

Norma Jeane Mortenson was not born into a psychologically neutral environment. Her early biography contains an accumulation of adverse childhood experiences that are strongly associated in modern research with complex trauma and lifelong autonomic dysregulation. Her mother, Gladys, was institutionalised for psychiatric instability. Norma Jeane spent years in foster homes and orphanages, moved repeatedly, and lacked a predictable attachment figure. There is evidence of sexual abuse in adolescence. These conditions are not incidental. They are precisely the developmental precursors that neuroscience now recognises as reshaping the stress system, altering threat-perception, and producing lifelong vulnerability to dissociation, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and emotional dysregulation.

Background: Childhood Conditions, Adult Presentation and the Logic of Misreading

Norma Jeane Mortenson was not born into a psychologically neutral environment. Her early biography contains an accumulation of adverse childhood experiences that are strongly associated in modern research with complex trauma and lifelong autonomic dysregulation. Her mother, Gladys, was institutionalised for psychiatric instability. Norma Jeane spent years in foster homes and orphanages, moved repeatedly, and lacked a predictable attachment figure. There is evidence of sexual abuse in adolescence. These conditions are not incidental. They are precisely the developmental precursors that neuroscience now recognises as reshaping the stress system, altering threat-perception, and producing lifelong vulnerability to dissociation, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and emotional dysregulation.

At the same time, Monroe showed sustained traits that modern clinicians would recognise as consistent with female-pattern autism. She maintained intense special interests (acting, psychoanalysis, literary study) that were pursued with unusual depth. She displayed significant social camouflage; Marilyn was a constructed persona worn over Norma Jeane in a manner that parallels contemporary descriptions of autistic masking. Several contemporaries described her as literal, unusually direct, and socially misattuned when not performing a learned script. Reports of sensory sensitivities and a lifelong stutter emerge repeatedly in the archival record. In the 1950s these traits had no diagnostic category available. Female autism was not merely missed; it was conceptually unavailable.

When those two histories are layered, developmental trauma and unrecognised neurodivergence, the picture becomes coherent in a way the contemporaneous diagnoses never achieved. What psychiatry called manic-depressive volatility may have been dysregulated trauma physiology amplified by a nervous system with atypical sensory thresholds. What publicists called emotional fragility may have been the exhaustion of permanent social masking under global scrutiny. What studios called unprofessionalism may have been the collision of autistic processing style with coercive labour conditions. What tabloids called madness may simply have been the visible residue of what the structure of her childhood made neurologically likely.

Analysis: Trauma, Neurodivergence and the Anatomy of Misreading

The conventional story of Monroe’s mind rests on an assumption that the professionals of her time were fit to interpret her. They were not. Psychiatry in mid-century America was not trauma-literate and was not gender-neutral. Women were constructed as biologically unstable and psychologically fragile. Emotional suffering was read as defect rather than injury. The diagnostic vocabulary available to her doctors was narrow, theoretical and heavily shaped by cultural assumptions about femininity. The men who named her did so using tools that were neither empirically validated nor conceptually suited to understanding the effects of early adversity or neurodivergence.

From a contemporary vantage point several features of Monroe’s life align more closely with C-PTSD than with bipolarity or borderline personality disorder. Her instability was not spontaneous or cyclical in the manner typical of bipolar disorder. It was reactive, relational and cumulative. Her distress intensified in conditions of humiliation, abandonment, surveillance or coercion. Her crises clustered around events that threatened attachment or identity. That pattern is classic trauma physiology: a nervous system calibrated by early danger responds disproportionately to perceived relational threat and shame. The loss of control over the self is not a disorder of mood but a survival imprint.

At the same time her cognitive and behavioural style exhibits several hallmarks of female-pattern autism as described in current research. Women with autism often construct compensatory personae to survive social environments that do not intuitively make sense. Monroe famously referred to Marilyn as something she could switch on. Masking is metabolically expensive; it produces exhaustion, cognitive overload and dysregulation. Autistic individuals frequently experience sleep disturbance, ritualised routines and sensory aversion. Monroe’s reliance on controlled environments, repeated takes and coaching is consistent with autistic coping under pressure rather than mere diva behaviour.

The interaction of trauma and autism is not additive but amplifying. Trauma produces hypervigilance, shame-sensitivity and dysregulated stress responses. Autism produces sensory overload, social confusion and the necessity of masking. Together they generate exactly the outward picture Monroe exhibited: a woman who is high-functioning when conditions are controlled but exquisitely vulnerable when they are not; a woman who performs competence and collapses in private; a woman whose breakdowns are interpreted as instability rather than the predictable cost of permanent self-erasure.

Hollywood did not merely fail to accommodate these vulnerabilities. It exploited them. Monroe was a commodity whose body, voice, image and time were purchased, modified and resold. Studio contracts removed autonomy. Publicity campaigns constructed a sexual persona that bore little resemblance to her internal life. She was punished professionally when she resisted exploitation and pathologised medically when she broke under it. The system produced the crisis and then named the crisis as her pathology. This is not incidental to her mental health story. It is the mechanism by which distress was both generated and medicalised.

Psychiatry and Hollywood functioned in parallel. One extracted value until collapse. The other labelled the collapse a disorder of womanhood. Neither asked what her life history would predict or what conditions might reduce harm. The vocabulary to describe developmental trauma did not exist. The framework to recognise female autism did not exist. The structural critique of the film industry’s treatment of women did not exist. In the absence of those concepts the surface manifestation of suffering was treated as the truth of her mind.

When viewed with contemporary knowledge the logic reverses. Her life ceases to look like proof of personal instability and becomes evidence of what prolonged trauma and unsupported neurodivergence produce in a hostile environment. The fact that her crises escalated in proportion to exploitation and humiliation argues against an endogenous mood disorder. The fact that she could perform with precision under predictable scripted conditions but not under improvisational pressure is congruent with autism. The fact that she oscillated between competence and collapse is consistent with the cost of masking and the neurological volatility of a traumatised nervous system.

This reframing does not depend on certainty about diagnosis. It depends on plausibility and coherence. The historic psychiatric interpretations fail on both counts. They do not account for the developmental origins of dysregulation, the gendered biases of the era, or the neurocognitive traits documented in her behaviour. The modern trauma-autism model does. It explains the pattern of her functioning without requiring internal defect as its cause. It situates her suffering in conditions, not essence. It converts her from a case of female instability into a case of systemic misreading.

To reinterpret Monroe is therefore not a sentimental exercise but a methodological correction. It reveals how medical categories are historically contingent and how women’s minds are rendered legible only through the vocabularies available to men in power. It highlights how trauma and neurodivergence in women are repeatedly renamed as character pathology. And it demonstrates that the archive of famous women’s breakdowns may in fact be an archive of untreated developmental injury misdescribed as femininity out of control.

Conclusion: What Re-Reading Monroe Reveals About Women’s Minds and Who Gets to Name Them

The question of whether Marilyn Monroe was autistic or traumatised is, at one level, unanswerable. She cannot be assessed. Her self-report is incomplete. Her psychiatric files were created within a system not designed to recognise what we are now capable of recognising. But to stop the inquiry there would be to miss the function of reinterpretation. The purpose is not to diagnose a dead woman. The purpose is to expose how diagnostic authority operates and how historic accounts of women’s minds are produced without epistemic humility.

When Monroe’s life is read through contemporary knowledge of complex trauma and female autism the story stabilises. The behaviours that once appeared erratic appear patterned. The traits once treated as personal failure appear neurologically explicable. The breakdowns once attributed to female volatility appear as the endpoint of cumulative harm. Psychiatric mislabelling becomes not a footnote of her life but a central fact of how women’s suffering was historically classified.

This matters for reasons beyond biography. The re-reading of Monroe functions as a case study in diagnostic justice. It models how many women , especially those with trauma backgrounds or non-typical neurocognition, may have been historically misdiagnosed, punished or pathologised for adaptations rather than diseases. It shows how culture manufactures the conditions of breakdown and then writes the narrative that the woman was defective. It reveals that what is archived as madness may actually be evidence of misrecognition.

To analyse Monroe with the tools psychiatry now possesses is to uncover not her inner truth but our disciplinary failure. The fact that developmental trauma and autism explain her life more parsimoniously than the labels she received demonstrates the contingency of those labels. Her mind was never neutral ground. It was interpreted by institutions that lacked the conceptual vocabulary to see her accurately and profited from not doing so.

Reframing Monroe is therefore not about rescuing her reputation but about recalibrating ours. It demands that we interrogate the frameworks that still govern women’s diagnoses. It demands that we treat trauma and neurodivergence not as afterthoughts but as primary explanatory systems. And it demands that we recognise how easily exploitation masquerades as illness and how long misreadings can calcify into fact once written down by an expert.

Marilyn Monroe is not valuable because she was exceptional. She is valuable because she was typical of what happens when a traumatised and possibly neurodivergent woman moves through systems built to convert her into a product and then explain the damage as her nature. To correct the record is not to settle her case but to unsettle the machinery that made the original diagnosis inevitable.

References

Andal, L. (2017) Marilyn Monroe Under the Veil: Autism, Numerology and Norma Jeane. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Hill, S. (2025) ‘Was Marilyn Monroe Autistic? A Feminist Look at Misdiagnosis and Trauma’, Medium, 15 July. Available at: https://medium.com/@intothebleach/reassessing-marilyn-monroe-misdiagnosis-autism-and-the-trauma-of-stardom-7723760b767a (Accessed: [insert date]).

Hull, L. et al. (2020) ‘Development and Validation of the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q)’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50(3), pp. 819–833.

Rondinone, T. (2023) ‘Marilyn Monroe and the Mirror of Madness’, Psychology Today [UK blog], 31 May. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-asylum/202305/marilyn-monroe-and-the-mirror-of-madness (Accessed: [insert date]).

Showalter, E. (1985) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago.