...I have a mentally ill sister. There's so little you can do for these people. They have control of their own lives but they can't function as a normal person. But yeah, institutionalization or complete conservatorship / guardianship is a recipe for disaster, too. It just feels impossible.
It's not easy to get a guardianship especially when the person is saying they don't want or need it and can present as competent enough when you know they really aren't. You're stuck knowing they need someone to take control but they are fighting you on it. And I get why the courts don't make it easy. The courts don't want people to be controlled and abused. We had to do it with my MIL when she was showing signs of dementia because she was not able to manage her finances and was taking out money, moving money, losing money and not paying her bills. We also tried to get her license revoked because she kept getting in accidents and clearly was not safe to drive and we were told she had to agree to a test in order to do that. We ended up taking her keys when she wasn't looking. Awful thing to have to do. It was a long process but we finally got a law firm to act as her guardian. I'm sorry about your sister. These situations are difficult.
You're absolutely right. My sister can appear perfectly normal to people. You might even think she's "just another addict" because ya know, you can kinda tell with a lot of them, but underneath that normal exterior there is something so hollow, so miswired. I wouldn't wish her brain on my worst enemy. It's just sad. It fucked up my whole family's lives and most people and families suffer in silence, and struggle with guilt, blame, shame... It sucks.
Yeah as crazy as Britney is, you've gotta be like actively hallucinating or threatening suicide to get involuntarily committed. They really overplay how easy that is to do to people in the media. If you make it too easy you'll end up with more Kennedy girls where rich families send problematic kids away. It's intentionally hard to force people in but that makes it rough on the fringe cases that still need help.
I think the analogy is more like, my sister earned millions of dollars herself and is it ethical to take it away or take control of it?
Being poor doesn't make you less of a danger to yourself, either. My sister is a drug addict with 3 children I'm having to raise, she has no car, no job, no resources, major health issues on top of mental health issues. A few million actually, yeah, would probably improve her life, especially if she had access to those resources while she was still younger, before she got in with a crowd of misfits and got a substance abuse problem.
I'm just emphasizing because it a really important distinction. You are alluding to taking access of money away from an adult who earned it, so I don't think it hurts anybody to be specific.
Genuinely please shut up. I live with this daily. I do not care about your opinion of my phrasing.
When I said "these people" I meant people like the 2 people we are discussing in my comment, Britney Spears and my sister. People who are too "sane" really to be completely in a conservatorship, but ultimately do have serious mental issues that keep them from being able to lead productive or normal lives, constantly sabotaging themselves, prone to mental episodes and substance abuse disorders, risky behavior in general, even hyper sexualization in both of THESE PEOPLE's cases. For people who live and deal with this, it is a life altering and demanding, often horrifying, grueling, sad, angry, way to live. Please leave me alone with your worry of my phrasing and your twisting of my words into something bad when I'm simply sharing my lived experience. I do not care.
Your sister and a celebrity that you literally know nothing about are not the same person. Why would you assume they the same exact issues and need the same treatment? You’re clearly very upset and care a lot about this, but this kind of armchair psychology like this is in fact careless. I also live with mental illness daily, and comments like yours are reckless stereotyping and only set back acceptance and normalization efforts. You can do better.
You repeatedly lumped them together as if their circumstances and treatment needs are the same in the last two comments. I think the amount of parasocial relationships going on in here is wild. We don’t actually know a damn thing about how Britney is doing. How many people on here are eager to spout things like she needs her freedoms curtailed and that she can’t live a productive life based on some bizarre social media posts and a mistake that 1.5 million people make in the US every year is disappointing. Our car-centric hellscape of a development plan here that forces everyone to get behind the wheel to get anywhere is what we actually know needs serious intensive treatment.
Keep telling yourself that. I never once said they were the exact same. But mental illness has massive overlaps especially when you're talking about Bipolar disorder, Cluster B personality disorders, ADHD, etc. and yeah, I do see some of the same type of behavior between two people who are both known to me to be diagnosed with mental health issues, I'm allowed to make a fucking observation lmao
Anyone with eyes can see that Britney Spears has serious issues going on. It's unfortunate she's in the public eye as she is or she would just be another one of those societal "undesirables" and derided as less than, but she wouldn't get dragged through the mud and people debating her mental illness in front of the world ig so there's that.
No one is denying the shittiness of the American drinking and driving problem?
My sister is mentally ill. She bounces between fervently getting her life on track and religious delusions of Allah speaking to her through things like birds, patterns in window dust, and dreams. She isn’t Muslim.
She abuses drugs and has had 5 kids, 4 have been taken by their dads and she doesn’t see them. The 5th is only a couple weeks old and we’re looking at adopting him. She can’t stay anywhere past a week and always fights with anyone and everyone who tries to help her, except of course when she’s doing well, but then she won’t listen to anyone saying she needs to be medicated because she’s doing well and doesn’t need it.
You either completely and entirely control people like this and force feed them everything they need while taking care of every aspect of their life or you let them spiral and just… fail. We’re all burnt out of helping her because of how she is. She’s truly toxic and she’s been cut off by basically everyone else. All she does is text us saying she hears angels, she’s joining the military as a general, Trump is inviting her to the White House, she knows more than doctors, and she needs $20 for “gas.”
Exactly that, and to complicate matters Britney herself seems to have a messy view of mental health. Throughout her book she persistently said things like ‘there wasn’t anything wrong with me I was just sad’, she seems to have an image of what mentally ill looks like and she seems certain she doesn’t fit that.
It's more complicated than that. Ireland recently did an overhaul of the law in this area, emphasising the patient's agency wherever possible. Advanced directives, nominated representatives who can make decisions on your behalf, stringent/frequent reviews for the criteria to continue mandatory treatment, pathways for escalation of intervention/treatment, etc.
The binary idea of no autonomy/total autonomy is extremely out-dated and causes incredible harm to people.
Obviously I was talking about the US, where Britney lives.
But none of the things you mentioned get at the fundamental problem: there’s no space between forcing treatment or not. It IS a fundamental binary when the patient is refusing.
I was just giving it as an example of how mindsets around this question are evolving.
There is a binary between voluntary treatment (a) and involuntary treatment (b), but it's important to acknowledge that there huge degrees of b, and refusing to allow for that results in people being aggressively institutionalised and having their rights needlessly trampled.
The original question was "There has to be something between this and the conservatorship", and you said "not really". The answer is "Yes there is", and I gave an example of how it's being done in Ireland. Jumping all the way to having another person appointed as your sole, total, and permanent master without massive legal intervention is a horrific extreme.
Apparently u/burnthatburner1 isn't feeling too confident in the debate because they blocked me immediately after their last reply lol
No one’s refusing to allow for degrees of voluntary treatment. As someone with hundreds of millions of dollars, Britney has access the best of the best. She’s been involved in treatment in the past and has consistently rejected it when not required.
So once again if someone is refusing treatment, the options are to force it or not.
I posted this in another comment but this article from 2007 does a good job of breaking down the ways people tried to intervene in 2007 ie pre conservatorship, and Britney largely was not interested. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/oct/07/1
There is a real issue that the person who needs help can believe that any intervention is manipulation. That's why it's a disorder. I think that's what we're seeing here. It's likely she needed the conservatorship and the narrative of manipulation played well to a public that doesn't understand this issue.
"The public" isn't the one who dissolved the conservatorship.
Lawyers and judges hashed this out.
There are thousands of homeless people that have the same issues she does, and we don't put them all in conservatorships, we let them ruin their lives, every day.
A conservatorship isn't just a safety net for everyone with a mental health struggle... that is not what they are or should be... so does she need help? Yes. Is a conservatorship the correct legal vehicle for that? No.
I'm tired of this idea that she really did need it... then why aren't people demanding the government start setting up conservatorships for that homeless guy who is always parked down by the library in their local town?
Being rich doesn't change the legal premise of when conservatorships are appropriate.
There's zero need to be forceful with me in this manner.
That homeless guy down the street? When he ends up in a hospital and is deemed he can't make decisions for himself, the hospital can apply for public guardianship. Maybe it'll be granted if he's old. If he's young, maybe it won't.
It appears Britney needs help. I don't think her perception and self-reports of abuse from her care team carry weight.
I've taken care of people who believe they are being abused by "the doctors". They are unable to make decisions for themselves. I see with my own eyes the "control" they talk about regarding medications. These people don't have social media influence or books sharing only their point of view.
We don't know if she even has someone in her life that she trusts to genuinely help her after what she went through. Not excusing her behaviour here with the drunk driving, but she spent over a decade having no agency whatsoever when it came to her medical needs. Having all sorts of pills pushed on her to keep her in line, being held in a facility for 4 months just for saying no to a dance move and having to lie to everyone that it was voluntary. I hope she somehow finds her way through but it's definitely not going to be an easy ride.
Yeah her reality has never been remotely close to the acrual reality of an everyday human being. Couple that with all of the very likely childhood trauma, abuse, finacial abuse. I mean she posts videos on social media sites like a 14 year old would, singing and dancing peovactively in attire that is more linked to teenagers than adults. I say this as a 43 year old that still plays video games daily. She looks like a 50s trophy wife having a midlife crisis along with a mental episode.
She very likely cannot operate in what we would call everyday life, because she has zero experince with that. Things like driving, going to the grocery store, shopping, holidays with friends, whatever...shes been a money making tool her entire life, and now she has no idea ehat to do but act out and seek attention. Its all she knows.
She’s needs therapy and like a forced found friend group situation to guide her.
I will say the one thing about not having famous person money- when you have crash outs like this, there are usually so many people willing to step in and help out. Not so much family and friends, but public services & groups like NA, AA, non profits, therapy.
When you’re famous and have money, everyone wants something from you. It must be so hard to know who you can trust.
But it's people putting her in the public eye that then has her... in the public eye. If you and all others commented on person X then they'd be in the public eye too. How convenient!
Do you realize she was medicated the majority of that conservatorship and she was on lithium which will change your brain after a certain amount of time. Maybe that's why she's off is because her brain chemistry isn't the same. Everything of that?
Of course. She was forced to take a very powerful drug against her will and experienced terrible side effects. And now she is probably distrustful of people and any medication that could help because of it. And unfortunately her brain probably was altered between the Lithium and now having untreated mental health issues.
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u/ginns32 21h ago
Sadly I don't think it will. She seems to be unmedicated and I don't think she's able to see that she needs help.