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Blogs by Erik Hare
Britney 2/3/2008 6:13:21 PM
I never wanted to tell the world my opinion of Britney Spears. Far too many people have written about her in a way that clearly violates the basic privacy that decency demands. Her recent brief committal as a ward of the State of California changes that to at least some extent.
It has been clear to me for nearly a year that Britney suffers from a serious mental illness. I first thought that it appeared to be Schizophrenia, but if there is a cyclical nature to it, marked by up days followed by down days, it is Bipolar by definition. The latter appears to be what the celebrity media has focused on lately, and I can accept that. What is important is that both are often quite treatable if the patient is willing to accept treatment. Without treatment, she might as well have a loaded gun pointed at her head and a nervous finger on the trigger.
That is where the nature of these kinds of illnesses becomes so difficult. A person with a mental illness is often incapable of understanding the nature of their own problem, and when the symptoms include paranoia it is unlikely they will trust anyone else. Shame brings about denial, further complicating the situation. Doctors cannot treat an unwilling patient, so the first step has to be acceptance of the situation. That’s always tough.
However, mental illness is nothing more than an illness of the brain. Someone who is suffering from an illness of any other organ, such as pancreatic cancer, receives nothing but sympathy; not so those who have an illness of their brain. Most people can accept that another part of their body needs help, but few easily accept that their brain is somehow in trouble. If our society understood that this is an illness of the brain, and nothing more, many of the major hurdles would simply not be there.
Shame simply should not be the factor that it is. Yet so many celebrity rags saw Britney’s trouble as nothing more than another opportunity to exploit her, reporting on her as if her entire life was nothing more than a performance for their amusement. That sickness is the real mental health issue here, both in the people that feel obliged to chuckle at it and the damage it does to people with an illness of the brain.
While mental illness, even serious mental illness, is usually treatable, the exact medical nature of the illness and how the drugs work is poorly understood. The process has been marked by trial and error, with doctors knowing only what usually works in situations that appear similar. That can mean that even a patient who accepts treatment does not receive a precisely perfect regimen the first time, requiring persistence beyond and above the initial acceptance. In short, patients usually have to very much want to be well.
I hope that Britney has reached that point, if for no other reason than her children very much need a mother. Beyond that, I hope that she can have a tremendous comeback, providing inspiration for the millions of people that suffer from the same illness of the brain. Her struggles might make it easier for so many others because of the mindless publicity that has made it harder for her so far.
Certainly, she has the resources to obtain the best treatment. Her father, currently in charge of her care, appears to take the situation very seriously. There is a lot of reason to hope, and there is even some reason to believe that one day she could be the spokesperson for a serious health issue that does not deserve the shame it gets. Many lives might be saved by this terrible public infatuation, meaning that some good could actually come from all this.
Britney’s temporary status as a ward of the state placed her in the care of a system that embodies all of the resources and hopes that we all share. It happens far more often than most people realize, yet we rarely have a chance to understand our shared responsibility to people that have run into a medical condition that is beyond their control. We are all getting an insight that rarely is sexy enough to make the media, and this time every unwinding event is thrown at us in excruciating detail.
I hope that Britney survives this and comes back stronger than ever. The world didn’t really need her as another teen idol, but as a mother and a survivor of this kind of illness her strength can give us all hope.
