Britney Spears Mental Health Problems And Her Loss of Freedom

Should Britney Spears lose her rights as an adult because she has mental health problems? This is a controversial topic, but it's an important one because it has implications for way more than just Britney Spears. Anyone who struggled with an addiction or mental health problem, this affects you. Anyone who has a family member with an addiction or mental health problem, this affects you. And I want to hear from you all. Now, I gotta tell you, there are no easy answers to these very complicated problems. And I think it's important to have a good dialogue about it. But I'm gonna ask you to please, let's have a dialogue respectfully, like adults. This is sure to evoke a lot of opinions, and I want to hear them all, but I want you to express them with respect. And let's act like adults here. Let's just remember to act like adults. Now, what spurred me to really think about this was another YouTuber by the name of Chris, Christina Randall. She released a video earlier today. I think the thumbnail title was my unpopular opinion. And so I started listening to it, and she was talking about how she was sort of in defense, I guess, for the whole Britney Spears conservatorship. Now, if you don't know what that is, let me tell you very quickly. So a lot of you probably remember when Britney Spears had that really big sort of meltdown in 2008 where she shaved her head and she, like, tried to beat down a photographer's car with an umbrella. Just wanna say, he might have deserved that. But anyways, after that happened, her father, Jamie Spears, filed for what was what's called a conservatorship, which basically gives him control. It's kind of like when you're under 18, how your parents can make decisions for you, like checking you into a hospital, medical decisions, financial decisions and all that sort. So when you have conservatorship over someone, it's kind of like you have that parental guardianship to be able to make decisions kind of like she was a child. Now, usually this is used in a circumstance, usually for an elderly person who maybe is struggling with dementia or Alzheimer's or some other kind of major disability where they're really not able to function and care for themselves. But it can result from mental health problems that are so severe that a person lacks sufficient insight and judgment to keep themselves and others safe. So some of you know that before I started my own practice, I worked in a psychiatric hospital, an acute care facility, which acute care psychiatric hospital is where people go when they're in major mental health crisis. I did that Kind of work for about 10 years. It was a good long time. Now, one of the things that I was involved with there was having to do something called designated examinations. And so basically when people would get committed to the psychiatric hospital, or that's what we called it, but officially they weren't really committed yet. They were on a hold for evaluation. Then designated examiners, usually like a counselor and a doctor or a nurse or somebody involved in the patient's care, would interview them and try to make a recommendation to court about whether or not the person has sufficient insight and judgment to keep themselves safe. Safe. Now, those are really sort of short term circumstances where someone loses their rights temporarily to decide whether or not they want treatment or not. You know, they're in a facility, a locked facility, sometimes against their will. Now, I know when we watch movies about mental hospitals and stuff like that, it's always like some kind of super scary movie where you get put in the psych hospital against your will and you're in the crazy house and you can never get out. And it's just like this total terrible nightmare. Well, I can't speak for all places or all facilities or all people, but in my experience with working at the psychiatric hospital, that really wasn't the case. In fact, it was really, really hard to prove that someone was a danger to themselves or others. They had to be acutely a danger to themselves or others. So to really create a case that someone's mental health is so severe that they lose their rights as an adult for a long period of time, like what happened to Britney Spears, in my experience, that is not an easy thing to prove or do. And a lot of people have a lot of anger. There's this whole free Britney Spears movement where people feel like it's really unfair that her father has these rights to make all these decisions over her. Now, no one knows for sure what Brittney's mental health diagnosis is, but my guess is it has something to do with substance abuse. And my guess is that, like I said, it's a guess. But I'm guessing that because she's been to Promises Malibu multiple times, and Promises Malibu is a known drug and alcohol treatment center. Now, most drug and alcohol treatment centers do also treat mental health, but they usually don't treat it if it's only just mental health, but no drug and alcohol. So there are also some rumors out there that Britney Spears has bipolar disorder. Those we can't prove or disprove, especially if there's substance use in the mix because an addictive disorder can look very much like bipolar disorder and. Or you could have both. And I think this is what's so confusing about the Britney Spears case, because whether it's like a bipolar disorder or an addiction disorder or both, both of those mental health problems can have periods where someone functions really well and then other periods where someone does not function well at all. And a lot of the argument about the Britney Spears thing is like, how can she not have the ability to make decisions for herself when she works like she does? When you see her making all these appearances, and she clearly is in good, stable, steady mind, and she clearly has rational thinking. Well, the problem with that is with something like bipolar disorder and. Or substance use disorder. Just because someone has those periods of rational thinking doesn't mean they're not very vulnerable to periods of relapse, whether that's relapse into the mental health problems or the addiction problems. Now, I do want to say this conservatorship issue has been back to court more than once, and the judge keeps upholding it. So you've had multiple lawyers, you've had multiple judges, you've had, I'm sure, multiple kinds of evaluations, and it keeps being upheld. And in fact, in one episode in the beginning where Brittany tried to hire a lawyer, the judge said she wasn't even competent to hire a lawyer on her own. That's pretty severe, I would say. And there was another incident where her lawyer that she did have went to court for her, and even he said that she wasn't competent to sign a piece of paper that he could represent her that was coming from her own lawyer. So what I want to say here is there is clear evidence that Britney Sears does have some kind of severe mental health problem. Now, it's very possible that she has episodes that happen sporadically. It seems to be pretty debilitating, according to the evidence in the reports. Now, let's talk about this issue, just sort of in general as it would maybe apply to anyone. And then let's talk about the issue a little bit more specifically. I want to give you my opinion about, specifically about the Britney Spears issue with this. In general, this is an issue between individual rights, family rights, and, like, bigger society, cultural rights. And for the most part, in our culture, individual rights are valued first and foremost. It is very difficult to take away someone's rights. I'm telling you, it's not easy. I have personally seen a lot, a lot of people in situations where I thought someone really needed to be committed. And I see bad situations all the time. So If I'm saying that like is really bad and they weren't committed, I see it all the time. And anyone who is a family member of someone with a mental health disorder or an addiction can tell you how frustrating it is. Because the individual rights of an adult, actually of someone usually in most states 16 or up, outrank the family rights. And so you have someone who's severely struggling with addiction or severe mental health, who has rights about their treatment and their care. Their treatment providers can't even talk to their families. So you're dealing with somebody who has the right to exclude their family from giving any information or making suggestions or even finding out what's going on. And so families often get stuck in this situation where they have a loved one that is completely out of control, completely unsafe for themselves, completely unsafe for the family who are absolutely powerless to do anything about it. I've seen it so many times, and I gotta tell you, and I definitely agree that there are some situations where I do agree that a person's individual rights should be interrupted, at least temporarily. Let me explain. I know that's a hot statement and a lot of you may disagree, and I completely understand that. But I've been doing this work for a long time and I always see the whole family system. So we see the person with the mental health or the addiction problem, we see their family, I mean, usually everybody. And so I've looked at this thing from every single angle. And so I've worked with this thing from every single angle, especially when it comes to things like addiction. You can have someone out there who's drinking and driving who are using drugs lately. In our community, there's a lot of people addicted to pain pills or heroin, but what they're really getting is fentanyl. And so they get behind the wheel of a car and then they, and then they overdose or they pass out or they fall asleep in all sorts of, which can and does result in all sorts of bad things. Now when you've got someone doing this on a daily basis, it's a complicated situation. And I know our first response is to say or think something like, hey, it's their life. If they want to screw up their life, if they want to blow all their money, it's their life. Well, I think that's a pretty short sighted view on it. Number one, the person isn't always in the mental capacity to make decisions about. I mean, the person doesn't even always have the capacity to make decisions for themselves. But to me, where it gets complicated is when their Decisions for themselves impact everyone else around them. And I see that families are particularly impacted. And I know what you're thinking, well, the family can just cut them off. The family doesn't have to deal with them if they don't want to. Again, that's a pretty short sighted point of view. What if this is your child? What if this is the mother or father of your children? It's not so easy to just put someone out of your life if they're, if they're toxic and unmanageable. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying it's a lot more complicated than that. Now, all that being said, in all of my years of doing this work, I'm not sure that I've seen a parent or any other situation where someone got sort of full custodial rights over another adult. I might, maybe I've seen it once or twice, but not very often. It's a really hard thing to pull off. Now let's move on to the Britney Spears issue. Now I know a lot of people love to be conspiracy theorists and love to say, well, all the lawyers, all the judges, all the people are just paid off. But I gotta tell you, I just don't buy it. It's way too many people to be bought off like that. Even Britney Spears didn't even try to fight the fact of the conservatorship. Now apparently reports say she does have an issue with the fact that it's her father that's in control of it and she really feels like someone else should be in control of it. And I think where this gets complicated is because Britney Spears has a ton of money. In most of these general everyday situations where I'm talking about where someone has the authority to make someone else's decisions, there usually isn't like a lot of money involved. And so when you're doing that, it's not, it's not for any kind of personal gain. When it comes to Britney Spears situation, there's this question of, you know, is this her father really acting in the best interest for her or is he in it for the money because he gets a certain percentage of any amount of money that she brings in. And so it would be easy to see that there could possibly be a conflict of interest here, right? If he controls all the money, if he decides what, you know, work she can take and what she can't take, who she can be around who she can't and, you know, makes the decisions about brand deals and all that kind of stuff, Then you could see where it might get a little bit murky. So I'm honestly not sure exactly how I feel about that part. I'm not as totally 100% against it as most people on the Internet seem to be. Now one of the comments I read, it said, you know, I forget however many million dollars went to the conservatorship to pay, but I think almost all that went for lawyer fees and stuff like that. And what I read, I don't know if this is true, but what I read was I think the father got last year about $128,000, which, yeah, that's a good salary, but it's not like a crazy, crazy, crazy amount of money when my guess is it is way more than a full time job managing the situation with Britney. I'm not taking up for it. Like I said, I'm not sure how I feel about it. But I do think it's important that we think critically about these situations and not jump to conclusions. Honestly, I kind of agree with Christina Randall about this situation. And another little piece of evidence to this fact that I think kind of nudges me over in the corner, in this corner a little bit more is the fact that when her father went into the hospital for some medical issues, wasn't long after that that Britney herself ended up in the hospital. Wasn't long after that that Britney herself ended up in the psychiatric hospital. Now you could say maybe she was just so upset because her father wasn't doing well, or you could say that her father was in the hospital and couldn't like her manager and she went off the cliff. I don't know. I'm just saying, I'm just saying that the two events lined up pretty closely. All right, now it's your turn to weigh in. I definitely want to hear what you have to say about this topic, but please be nice about it.