Today I’m going to write about the conservatorship of Britney Spears and how it relates to mental health.Last week I wrote about the #FreeBritney movement and how people are declaring the Britney Spears is being held at a mental health facility against her will. I made the point that this is due to mental illness prejudice as no one would think she was being held against her will in another type of medical facility. (For the record, Spears is no longer in a mental health facility.)
I did not mention the conservatorship of Britney Spears and nor did I have any intention of doing so. However, people were quite happy to tell me how wrong I was about the #FreeBritney “movement” and how #FreeBritney was really about getting her conservatorship lifted. And after people insisted I look into it, I did. So today’s piece is going to be about mental health conservatorships and what it is we know about Spears’ conservatorship.
What’s a Conservatorship? What Does a Conservatorship Have to Do with Mental Health?
A conservator is a person or entity appointed by a court to manage the property, daily affairs, and financial affairs of another person, usually someone who is incompetent by reason of a physical or mental infirmity or age.
And,
A conservatorship is created by the appointment of a conservator, also sometimes called a guardian.
Conservatorships are sometimes used in cases where mental illness is involved. For example, if a person is mentally impaired to the point where they no longer can take care of themselves, a conservator may be fought for and appointed.
An example of this would be a person who suffered from a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. The psychosis itself might be treatable, but only with medication, and even when the psychosis is mitigated, it may be the case that other aspects of the illness continue to make the person so ill as to not to be able to handle basic accounting, housekeeping and so on. I know a family that has a conservatorship over their daughter because of this and the arrangement works well and allows the daughter freedom, independence and an ability to succeed on her own terms.
Britney Spears’ Conservatorship
If you were not living under a rock in 2007, you probably remember Britney Spears going off the rails. She had two small children and yet she couldn’t stop using illicit substances, shaved her head in front of the press and this topped off a 55-hour marriage she had embarked on a few years earlier. She would also go to rehab only to leave 24 hours later. And in August of 2007, Spears was cited for hit-and-run for allegedly leaving the scene of a minor accident and driving without a valid license. She was then spotted driving with her children in the car.
And “according to the 2012 Lutfi-Spears lawsuit proceedings, in January 2008 Britney took ‘all or most’ of 30 tablets of prescription amphetamines within a 36-hour period. She then locked herself in the bathroom with Jayden and refused to turn the child over to Federline [the father] . . .”
In my opinion, she made very poor decisions and endangered her life and the lives of her children. (Doctors agreed on two separate occasions as she has been held as a danger to herself or others [under a 5150] twice.)
In February of 2008, Jamie Spears (Britney Spears’ father) became a temporary co-conservator over Spears’ affairs. In October of 2008, “all sides agreed” to make the conservatorship permanent.
The Result of Britney Spears’ Conservatorship
On the one hand, being under a conservatorship, Spears has limits placed on her life. Jamie Spears has decided on her manager and even her guards. It is said that Britney isn’t even allowed to drive her own cars without permission. Would that make a person feel like a prisoner? That would seem reasonable, yes.
On the other hand, Britney Spears’ career has risen from the dead due to some smart decisions and, likely, stability. She got access to her children back, she was working out again, she was recording music again and she wasn’t speeding death-defyingly through L.A. with a pack of paparazzi trying to catch her. So she’s definitely made some big gains thanks to the conservatorship.
If you read about Spears post-conservatorship, she seems like a reasonable human being. If you read about her pre-conservatorship, she seems downright bonkers. Does that mean she has a mental illness? I have no idea, but I know that a judge thinks she’s mentally impaired in such a way that she benefits from the current oversight. And, in my opinion, she sure the heck functions better today than she did 11 years ago.
What’s Wrong with a Conservatorship for Mental Health Reasons?
Look, I don’t know Britney Spears’ personal situation, I do not know the truth about Britney Spears’ mental health — none of us do. We are not her.
What I do know, though, is that conservatorships can save lives. And sometimes the person at the center of it knows that. Sometimes the stability that comes from someone else taking care of things like bills and everyday tasks actually allows the person to flourish. Maybe if you removed Spears’ conservatorship she would decompensate dramatically. Maybe this is what her doctors say. Maybe this is the case the lawyers successfully made to the courts. Maybe this is what Spears herself believes. I don’t know. You don’t know. There are pluses and minuses to a conservatorship. Maybe the pluses win in this case.
Why #FreeBritney?
What I want to know is why people think they know better than Britney Spears does about what is right for her. Do people not see the irony of deciding that Britney needs to be “freed” when she, herself, has not decided that? Should people not respect her own wishes more than that? Isn’t that what they’re claiming her father isn’t doing?
The #FreeBriteny notion came about from a single “credible source” on a podcast. That’s it. In the articles I have read there is no evidence that Britney Spears is actively fighting her conservatorship at this time. In fact, in some cases, people are quite clear that her conservator(s) have done very well by her. There are no reports that I see of dramatic overreach. What it sounds like to me is the control of the conservatorship is being used in an effort to prevent another train wreck. You might agree with that approach or not agree with that approach, but regardless, it’s not you. It’s a person who leads a very different life than you. One that I don’t understand and one that you don’t understand. There are forces acting on Spears that just don’t act on the rest of us plebeians. It’s no wonder we have a hard time seeing things from her perspective. I feel like people are trying to “free” someone that is doing just fine already. In fact, she’s considerably more fine as a mother, as an artist and as a person than she was before.
My opinion on this situation hasn’t changed at all and I do think the concept that she was being held against her will was directly related to it being a mental health facility. This takes me back to my previous point: the hashtag should be #SupportBritney. It seems to me that someone who is going through such a hard time could use that a lot more than a made-up “movement.”
Sources
- “A Complete Timeline of the Ongoing Drama Surrounding Britney Spears’ Well-Being and Conservatorship”
- “Taking Care of Britney Spears: The Shocking Sequence of Events That Led to Her Decade-Long Conservatorship”
- “Britney Spears Returns”
- “Behind the Britney Story: A Conversation With Writer Jenny Eliscu”
Banner image by Kristopher Harris from Charlotte, NC [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Image by Glenn Francis [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Not sure why you need a conservator to pay bills etc., plenty of rich busy people around who hire help for all that. For Brit o have fewer rights than Casey Anthony is just plain crazy, but greedy people will do anything, and California is famous for being liberal and greed driven and known for interpreting the law to fit their own agenda. This law was made for people in comas, only a blue state would include a multi talented money making woman, but then, liberals hate women, this would never happen to a man.
While I’m sure this is written from a place of good intentions, this is utterly repugnant.
I’m going to respond first to one of the comments here asserting that all must be well because there is a requirement that “an entire psychiatric team” review the situation, and get court approval from time to time. The problem with this, and the write-up above, is that this naive faith in the competence and integrity of the mental health and legal systems is misplaced; the crux of Spear’s problems are not the conservatorship itself, as that is enabled by superficial justifications rooted in those systems.
There are no “chemical imbalances” that have ever been identified by science, NAMI and pharmaceutical companies screeching to the contrary notwithstanding. Academia has never formally embraced that sort of pseudoscience and is now more assertively distancing itself (while also denying any culpability and twisting itself to maintain a facade of legitimacy, but…). Yet bandwagon clinicians have not only embraced the vague idea, but preach it with the fervor and bigotry of a television sermon. What we get is a dynamic where people are misled and harmed by the very “care providers” that are meant to help them and protect them. Families are roped in with NAMI rhetoric that their loved ones need what is being done to them, and when the victim protests, they are told they just can’t understand the “need for [the particular forced] treatment. Insight as a concept becomes contorted and weaponized. “Validate me and your abuse, or else”.
People can go many years as a family member, clinician, or even the victims themselves and never gain insight into the multiple facets of the dynamic. Everyone wants to trust a psychiatrist; the psychiatrist wants to protect themselves from liability (which only goes one way – there is no effective liability for the harm inflicted) if something ever did happen with someone as well as their perceived professional liability with their peers (to the extent they really understand anything beyond regurgitating the DSM as if it were a bible); the recipient is misled and told they are being helped, told not to trust themselves, that hurt is really help, or to just cooperate regardless. And while I bristle at people claiming “it’s all about the money, it’s all corruption!”, it has to be said that there is an awfully big element in the room, commensurate with the ungodly sums and numbers of jobs directly or indirectly tied to maintaining the farce.
It’s illustrative, I think, if a little tangential, to look at how the names of the major classes of psychotropic drugs have evolved for marketing and political reasons. “Chemical lobotomizers” became the “major tranquilizers” became “anti-psychotics”. How could anyone be opposed to an “anti-psychotic”?! Clearly so innocuous and good, it attacks the psychosis! But it doesn’t work that way. Rushed through approval after a few superficial short term trials, there has never been any evidence that the catecholamine hypothesis was anything more than childish straw-grasping and bigotry. To be fair, it’s very difficult to arrange proper studies in this domain, but we’ve seen data for decades now showing that, at least long term (and maybe in general), dopamine blockers not only don’t fix anything, but they actually tend to make the conditions worse, to say nothing of the minimized but often horrific negatives, including brain damage. “Mood stabilizers” and “anti-depressants” follow similar arcs (although ADs haven’t seen the same level of dramatic change – they’ve been a relatively constant presence that mostly don’t work, with a small number of people that swear by one drug or another).
No, we don’t know with certainty much of the detail of Britney’s case. But we can put some bounds on it and we can clearly identify classic struggles here. The parents, aggressive, perhaps (we don’t know for sure) exploitative and naive, blame Britney and the “care team” while simultaneously deferring to the team and using it as a cudgel to silence Britney; that team (the conservator) blames Britney and the family for, essentially, not being fully enabling, that the conservator is a “tireless advocate” who is obligated to “give Britney the tools she needs” [but cannot have or understand] to validate what is said about her. Britney, almost innocently, really, is patient, cooperative, assertive, and finally speaks out in court, and is ignored, with her frustration being blamed not on her abuse, but on her.
Yes, a conservatorship may have its uses. This is not one of them. It’s psychiatric violence, no matter how we contort ourselves to claim otherwise. For the public, step one is to stop blaming the victim.
One thing many of the #FreeBritney people don’t understand about conservatorship (I’m not even American yet I can find out this info, so these people are being willfully ignorant IMO) is that it gets reviewed on a yearly basis by not only a judge, but an entire psychiatric team.
If every year the psych team and judge come to the conclusion that she would still benefit from it, why would a bunch of strangers not in her life know any better than those who have her intimate, personal, health records and life details.
The people part of the #FreeBritney movement are just loud virtue signalers with too much time on their hands. Some of them are suffering from mental illness themselves and are hard core projecting and some are completely obsessing over it even.
Heck I got into arguments on Twitter when you made your first post about it. It was quite comical seeing some try to call you out as ‘toxic’ for stating your own opinion just as they have their own.
Warning to posters…long post – a few things on my mind today.
Dear Natasha,
You offer a wonderful service here, and I commend you for it. You have been duly noted as the recipient of many Achievement Awards…well done! I know you can’t earn a living on this blog alone…pocket change is probably more accurate. I used to relate to your blog more in years past, when you had more posters who suffered from one of the more severe forms of BP1 d/o, i.e. textbook, full blown manic and/or depressive psychosis with some auditory hallucinations. Those posters have mostly disappeared in the past few years – I don’t know if they’re following you elsewhere, or if they’ve literally disappeared from this earth. Not all of us are on FB, IG, etc. I’ve personally developed an allergy to (anti) social media, for reasons I won’t get into here ( but my parenthesis is a big hint about how I feel.) That’s another topic all together.
Conservatorship is a *huge* issue for people who are prone to losing complete touch with reality. We peasants only know it as being appointed a ‘Responsible Payee’ for an SSDI/SSI recipient in The USA. I did that for one of my adult sons during the first 7-8 years of his illness. It was assigned to me by The SSA – I was only asked if I was willing to oversee his finances, keep records and submit documents for his frequent SSA audits. In an average year, 70,000 Americans are doing that for their SMI loved ones – now *those* are people I can relate to. That would be a great topic to talk about here too.
Do you permit your adult son buy that $500 guitar (when he’s never played before, nor expressed any interest in it?) How about when he receives $800/month in disability income and it’s already spoken for? What about when he suddenly tells you he has a great singing voice, yet you’ve never heard him sing before? What to do when he decides he’s going to move 3,000 miles away to LA to become the next great singing star? (He did briefly – well, the moving part anyway.) Hey, at least we knew where he went that time – it wasn’t as bad as when he truly went missing while psychotic. I can tell you this much – nobody ever fought for ‘conservatorship’ over our son’s (non-existent) assets.
All that, because the squirrels on the college quad convinced him to drop out, and become a big star in Hollywood. A mother’s dilemma…what do you do as a Responsible Payee to ensure your bonds with your adult child are not horribly damaged? And yet, you cling to hope that your SMI disabled child can find meaning and purpose in his broken life. Maybe he really can learn the guitar & sing?
What does this have to do with Ms. Spears? Not much, really. She has major stresses in her life, yes. Well all do. She has an undisclosed MH issue. ‘We’ get outed without our permission, and we accept that? Why? Ms. Spears has had the advantage of acquiring serious money for her talents, which in itself, can breed quite a support system. Yes, she has to sort out who’s really there for her – so do the rest of us. We don’t get to go to “Wellness Centers” though, with passes to leave when needed. We go to bland, dank locked places labeled, ‘(State) Behavioral Health Hospital.’
My son doesn’t have an illness of his ‘Behavior’ – nor do I. We have brain illnesses, whereby at times…certain behaviors may be symptomatic of that brain illness. I see Cancer Treatment Centers labeled as such, or as ‘Infusion Centers’ that administer chemo labeled as such. Those centers are never labeled for a symptom of cancer nor a side effect from anything – Diabetes Centers aren’t either. Has anyone ever seen a chemo center labeled ‘The Nausea & Vomiting Institute?’ How about ‘The Lowered Immunity Center, then? There…another topic.
Why are we still putting up with so much of this crap in 2019? A great topic for MH Awareness Month. I mean no offense, Natasha, but I’ll be blunt – enough of The Britney Spears saga, please. I don’t think I’m alone in my sentiments here – there are reasons few people are responding to these threads. Unless a major Star of any kind *truly* comes out of the closet about the illness we have, (and suspect B.S. has it too)…we’re all just speculating anyway.
Hmm – ‘Coming out of the Closet’ about SMIs, and is it okay for friends and family members to ‘out someone’ without their consent? They sure seem to think it’s okay…it is not! There.Boom – another topic we need to get our act together on. I spend a lot of vacation time in two well known LGBT communities – I admire the perseverance I’ve seen re: progress made with that movement. Why are people with SMI’s still so far off the radar?
And yes, I really should offer you a guest column here and there about my favorite topic – the neuroscience of bipolar disorder (I know you have in the past, but there’s so much more.) I have valid input from reading so many studies for the past twenty years years. I’ve read your guidelines; so much of my knowledge is in my memory (the hippocampus primarily,) that I don’t really feel like re-researching so much info, to reference everything accurately. I’m getting too old to do term papers, but if you wish to know this much – there *is* a neurological reason why people with BPII have *way* more suicidal thoughts then most of us with BP1. I know it’s constant with people with your form of this illness, Natasha – that has to be horrible. Neither my son nor I have to endure that, thankfully. You do an exceptional service for people on that topic. Stand proud.
In closing – yes, my son really can sing very well, (i was unaware he’d been “doing it all my life Ma,” (in the shower and baseball dugouts apparently,) and he did learn to play the guitar ‘good enough’ to get by, (quite a learning curve if one doesn’t start real young.) His voice is the real feature of his solo acoustic act. He *finally* has plenty of gigs these days, now that he’s closing in on that dreaded 4-0. The squirrels were (partially) right, it seems! Have a good one – all of you out there.