What Britney does in private is none of your business, and what she does in public you don't have to follow. Just leave her the **** alone for once in her life.
But Britney is uploading her ’private life’ onto Instagram videos to her 42.1m followers (and yes, I confirm, I have never looked at it myself). Fact is, Britney had been under conservatorship via her father. For a court to have granted this, there will have had to have been a diagnosis of a serious condition that diminished personal responsibility, such as a serious mental illness. It has never been revealed what that diagnosis was, but most people assume a Bi-Polar affective condition. This is not just someone being manic-depressive, as it used to be known; it seriously impacts the quality of that person’s life and in most cases the depressive side being more prevalent and longer lasting than the fleeting manic ones. Many such persons make numerous suicide attempts. You mentioned the fact that not long ago terms such as ‘imbecile’ or ‘cretin’ were considered OK but now are not.
Actually, those terms were diagnoses by educational psychologists as a tool to identify and provide specialized education for such children who do not thrive in a normal classroom, or even needing institutionalized care. It was the general public that turned these terms into a stigma. When we said, ‘Go back to Shenley’ in the infants’ school playground, we had no idea what it meant or even where Shenley was (it referred to a psychiatric hospital near Colney Hatch and served Middlesex County), suffice to vaguely understand that it referred to a mysterious condition called ‘madness’ (of which we also knew nothing about). Our grandparents’ and even parents’ generation never talked openly about such things. Even cancer was spoken of in whispered terms as ‘the Big C’ and many people were loath to accept their kids needed glasses or hearing aids or – heaven forfend! – ‘special educational needs’. So in fact, it is NOT talking about things such as serious mental illness that causes stigma.
Susan Sontag, American essayist said:
[…] that the clearest and most truthful way of thinking about diseases is without recourse to metaphor. She believed that wrapping disease in metaphors discouraged, silenced, and shamed patients.
‘
Illness as Metaphor’, 1978.
In respect of Britney Spears, if indeed she does have a serious diagnosed mental health condition, then this will be a medical fact, and it will be a medical fact that such an illness (for example, schizophrenia, clinical depression, bi-polar or other affective or endocrinological disorders) can be treated by medication to control the symptoms. Likewise, it remains a fact that not taking the aforesaid medication will almost certainly cause the diagnosed person to relapse into the former distressing symptoms that brought them to the attention of the medical profession in the first place.
IMV people who claim that Britney was only put under conservatorship because her father wanted to control her career and make a fortune out of her fame are ignoring the very public fact of Britney’s current mental health unravelling before everybody’s eyes. To claim that this is ‘her private life’ and ‘all is well’, is an example of how our grandparents used to stigmatize mental illness by not talking about it and pretending it doesn’t exist except behind hospital walls. Your claim that we must not talk about Britney being ‘off her meds’ is the stigmatizing one, as though it is taboo to mention such a thing.
In the meantime carry on enjoying the videos, if that is your thing.
