Britney’s Overdose on fame by Kate Leaver
Her American Dream has turned into a nightmare. Kate Leaver explains why it’s all our fault.
Poor, darling Britney Spears. The virgin sacrifice of 90’s pop. The girl who could give little girls big dreams and middle aged men wet ones with one midriff-bearing dance routine.
And now she’s the broken girl the world has cast their grisly pity upon. The possibly pregnant, publicly disgraced and potentially psychotic popstar who has abandoned her children and her underwear.
And you’re to blame. I am.
We all are.
You may well believe that Lynne Spears, Brit’s mum is to blame. You may think Britters is a train wrecked trash bag. But when it’s no longer saucy enough to blame a human being, do as many doctors and gossips have done and diagnose Brits from a distance. Speculate on her reasons for entering rehab clinics, perhaps compare and contrast some MTV performances and slap her with a mental illness diagnosis. Why not? If she’s volatile, unpredictable and self-destructive, she is clearly deeply troubled.
The problem here is that poor old B Spears has been said to have all of the following; bipolar disorder, post-partum depression, multiple personality disorder, clinical depression and schizophrenia. We cannot confirm or obtain a diagnosis from any clinic she has sashayed through. We cannot observe her behaviour in any true or consistent context. Our conception of Britney is surreal, fragmented and selective. And yet we have the audacity to presume we know her well enough to judge her mental state.
I raise this slice of the Great Britney Saga because I think it’s actually really fucking important. Not just in terms of Britney herself.
Britney is a walking, talking symptom of a dangerously confused culture. She is a caricature of all the hideous facets of our society, and we love it.
We loved to follow her back when she was pretending not to shag JT. Now that she’s sexed up her image and become a tragic embarrassment, we love it even more. We’ve created a monster! But at least it had a catchy soundtrack.
Let me put this out there – it is not possible for Britney Spears to actually have 6 or 7 mental illnesses simultaneously. She is not a human asylum. She is ill, yes. But mark my words if she had stayed in that trailer park in Southern America she would never have developed schizophrenia.
Miss American Dream Britney Spears demonstrates what a transient and tricky thing mental illness can be. How much of this miscellaneous illness of Britney’s has to do with genetics and psychology? And how much has it to do with an overdose of celebrity?
Mental illnesses can indeed develop in early adulthood. There are many documented cases of this and Bipolar Disorder especially is known to emerge in late adolescence. Drugs can also bring on mental illnesses, and Britney’s big nights out with Tara Reid and pinging with Paris point to this as another trigger.
So, it is completely possible for Miss Spears to be mentally ill. Her erratic behaviour, admission into hospitals and complete lack of self respect suggest it. These things may have changed her chemical make-up to some extent. But there is one glaring factor that sets Britters apart from other mentally ill patients. Fame. And I would argue that it’s unparalleled fame. We’ve seen collapses of young stars before. Micheal Jackson, Drew Barrymore, that kid from Home Alone. But Britney is special. Britney has had her very own brand of fame. She has been idolized in a way that no other Girl-Not-Yet-A-Woman has.
This becomes a convoluted situation. Celebrity status warps Britney’s behaviour, making it difficult to isolate the appropriate symptoms to diagnose her. She needs help. She needs to be under psychiatric observation so that they can dissect her psyche to understand which of her actions are caused by an illness, which are in her nature and which were induced by overexposure at a tender age. She is a fascinating case study in mental instability being caused by social factors, circumstantial pressures and chemical imbalance.
Let’s evaluate this. The TMZ website reported in late January that Britney was “suffering from some sort of Bipolar Disorder”. There are indeed several versions of Bipolar, but this tiny news update is not vague because of discretion or medical ambiguity. It’s vague because it has piss all evidence of what it is trying to assert as truth. It goes on to say that Commissioner Scott Gordon has repeatedly ordered her to undergo psychological tests but she has not complied. Of course this begs the question, if she had not been tested by a medical professional at this point, how can such a claim be made about her condition?
An article from The Daily Telegraph in mid January with a headline about Britney’s alleged suicide note includes an anecdote about a sales assistant hearing sex noises coming from the change room Britney went into with her lover. This was cited as an example to support the case that she has multiple personalities. To me it seems like someone whose exhibitionism got a little out of hand. Hell, maybe she was toey. Remember her ‘Toxic’ film clip? The one where she gets jiggy with a hot guy in an ugly mask on the aeroplane? Public sex wasn’t evidence for mental illness then.
In an article from Associated Press, proof that Britney is crazy is that “earlier this week, she was photographed holding her pet dog and crying”. So, the evidence is flimsy to say the least. The articles are rife with speculation. All spokespeople have refused to comment on Britney’s condition. Neither Britney’s nor Kevin Federline’s lawyer will make comment on their situation. There is nothing to suggest that Britney has seen a doctor, nor that she has been diagnosed with anything. All we have is a montage of disaster; Britney bashing a car with an umbrella, Britney running over a photographer’s foot, up-skirt pictures of Britney, no make-up pictures of Britney and pictures of Britney looking very angry in her car.
My point is this. Britney’s mental health is tragically unstable. We do not have the authority, the evidence or the right to diagnose her. I am aware that in effect I too am assessing her condition from afar, but I maintain that if indeed she is mentally ill, it is not in the conventional sense. If she has any one of the illnesses attributed to her in the past months, it was caused by her absurd levels of fame. The pressures on her as a woman, a performer, a sex symbol and a mother have caused her downfall. Whether this has affected the chemical functioning of her brain and the state of her mental health is subject to medical and personal opinion.
Psychiatric diagnosis requires delineating between symptoms of nature or character and those caused by a condition. In this case, we cannot truly define whether Britney is ill, which illness she has or how she developed it. As ever, we can only speculate.
In making the assertion that Britney is ill, even if it is with Celebrity-induced Fame-titis or some such abstract condition that does not slot easily into a diagnostic classification, we must be extremely mindful of what we are implying about mental illness. If Brit’s disgraceful behaviour that is incongruent with the virginal image created for her early career makes her crazy, then this implies that any action unprecedented within someone’s public persona warrants medical attention. Similarly, to brand her a trashbag without attending to the very real and serious mental problems Britney faces is belittling and dangerous.
Britney Spears is more than gossip magazine royalty. If we look at her story in a sociological, compassionate way, it has massive repercussions for the way we allow our society to operate and the way in which we treat the mentally ill. Having tried for years to evoke impassioned feelings with her lyrics, she’s finally affected some constructive discourse in her own catastrophic lifestyle.
We need to stop harassing Brits. Hit her baby one more time and perhaps the morbid bets made on radio programs that she will die in 2008 will sound all the more feasible.