Britney Spears’s Conservatorship and the Harm of “For Your Own Good”

What’s terrifying about Spears’s situation, for a certain kind of disabled person, is that we are a razor’s edge away from joining her.

This is An Unquiet Mind, a National Magazine Award-winning column by s.e. smith that explores disability identity and its interaction with the world at large.

In high school, I wrote a haiku about Britney Spears.

Lean in, and I’ll tell it to you. Wait. First, you should know it is very bad.

Britney Spears and I

walk side by side in heaven

Fame makes us tired.

I have since burned the notebook it lived in along with various other effluvia from my high school years. Some things do not need to be saved for posterity.

The poem was part of a collection of juvenilia intended to present a series of juxtapositions, impossibilities: How could Britney Spears and I walk side by side anywhere, let alone in heaven? How could I place myself in the same line of verse as the princess of pop, the one we lip-synched to in the car on the way to parties? The one we bobbed our heads along with while swishing our short plaid skirts and bemoaning the stains that appeared, despite our best efforts, on our snug white button-downs? The one who played from the stereo while we were tripping in our chunky shoes on the uneven ground outside ramshackle houses in the woods, drinking cheap vodka on sagging porches? Britney Spears and I walked on different streets, in different universes. The kind of fame she had was the kind I couldn’t even touch.

I didn’t know then what I know now, about the lives of child stars and people who rise up with the speed of bottle rockets, surrounded by grownups who say that they are doing things for the child’s own good. Sometimes, maybe, those grownups are good and kind. Sometimes not. Always, snarled through everything, there is money. Often millions of dollars of it, there for the taking with the help of a gentle nudge, for your own good.

I didn’t know then what I know now, about Britney Spears in particular: how she hustled continuously since childhood until she slammed against the wall of a conservatorship in 2008—one that’s been watched and opposed by fans almost from the start, especially those with mental health conditions. I didn’t know how her iconic status would tarnish and crumble as she was chewed up by the early-2000s paparazzi machine, which viciously sniped away at her, photographers pocketing tens of thousands of dollars for a snap, until she broke. I didn’t know that her face would appear on every supermarket newsstand, with lurid, vast fonts scrolling above unflattering photographs. I didn’t know how the public would sneer, how the articles would describe her “breakdown,” and how she would be hastily railroaded into an abusive legal arrangement that would last over a decade before exploding into the public consciousness during a dramatic court hearing.

As a society, we collectively believe that people in positions of authority should tell others how to live their lives. It’s for your own good, people tell small children when they scream in terror at the dentist’s office. Don’t apply for that job, you’ll be unhappy there, it’s for your own good, says a friend’s mom giving unsolicited advice. Get the surgery, it’s for your own good, a doctor recommends. The phrase has become a cliché.

For a disabled person, the phrase hits differently. You hear these words a lot when the people around you decide to make decisions for you. They do not consult you or weigh your humanity; someone else always knows best. Maybe it’s a small decision—apple pie instead of blueberry, or an orange shirt instead of the green one. But more often, it’s a larger thing. Where you go to school, who you get to socialize with, whether you are allowed to control your own fertility, whether you will be sent to an “educational center” where they will force you to wear an electric shock device, whether you can marry, if you are allowed to lead your own life.

“For your own good” has an intense weight for disabled people, because it is not merely a recommendation or opinion. Sometimes it is imposed upon us against our will; sometimes we are, as Spears has been, forced to dance at the behest of others. Watch again: there is a quiet sadness in her eyes in the “Work Bitch” video, as she moves through ornate choreography and sings about taking control and achieving the capitalist metrics of success—the Maserati and the mansion—while in the real world, she was kept on a restrictive allowance and forced to work, bitch.

“For your own good” has an intense weight for disabled people, because it is not merely a recommendation.

One does not necessarily need to be in a conservatorship to be at the mercy of “for your own good.” This logic is perhaps what has made it so easy to enable conservatorships, which are seen as a natural extension of things society is already doing to make sure disabled people are “taken care of.” We are already “protecting” disabled people by deeming them incapable of interacting with the world on their own terms: The supervisor who makes assumptions about a disabled employee’s capacity or interests. The professor who overlooks a disabled student’s ability to contribute to the discussion. The friends who keep secrets because they believe it’s a form of protection. The parents-of who control their children’s lives without pausing to wonder whether their kids might enjoy or deserve self-determination. Underlying these gestures is the idea that disabled people are half-finished, uncertain, incomplete, childlike, innocent, in need of sheltering.

People seem genuinely astounded when we suggest that one could simply ask a disabled person about their interests and capacity. Maybe your blind friend does want to go on the ski trip!

I don’t know what Spears has or hasn’t been diagnosed with, whether she identifies as disabled or mentally ill or neither of those things. But she has become ensnared in a system designed for us, disabled people, and she has spent over a decade foundering in it while people tell her it is for her own good. Silly Britney, we hear from her father, she just wants to concentrate on the work. He is, naturally, happy to step in and make the sacrifice of managing her daily life and all those insignificant little financial details so she can concentrate on the work. The work that has earned him millions of dollars. The same Britney Spears who was a ruthless and canny businesswoman, who worked closely and actively on the production of her music and the development of her live shows. The woman who clearly knew what she wanted and took it. The woman who is perfectly capable of hiring a financial manager—a common decision amongst people who are worth tens of millions of dollars. This woman cannot make financial choices? Cannot decide, in consultation with a doctor, which medications she would like to take? Cannot make her own friends? Go out for a walk in the park on her own?

I didn’t know in high school what I know now: that, oddly, Britney Spears and I do walk side by side, but we are not in heaven, and a pane of glass separates us, thick and wavering. I could put a hand against its cool expanse and wait for her to raise her own to mirror it, and we would still be worlds away even as we are but a layer of soda-lime apart.

First we envied her; then we mocked her; then we were filled with an existential panic at the thought of becoming her. The thing that is terrifying about her conservatorship, for a certain kind of disabled person, is that we are a razor’s edge away from joining her. We are not sane enough, our brains do not work in the right way, we cannot perform to someone’s satisfaction, and so a quick hearing with a handful of lawyers and a sympathetic judge can put our lives entirely under someone else’s control, creating a situation that can be impossible to escape. Sometimes we are forced into it through cruel administrative twists in which a conservatorship is the only way to access needed services. Despite the activism around conservatorship abuse, our fear of falling through the cracks is real. How many other people trapped in conservatorships have you seen getting international media coverage, with attorneys lining up to help the conservatee?

For your own good, they say. There is something deeply dehumanizing and depersonalizing about that phrase. They isolate us so that we cannot cry for help or respond to the cries of our fellows. There is something in me that breaks when I hear that Britney Spears didn’t know she could ask to terminate the conservatorship. “For her own good,” she was kept isolated from people and information she needed to make informed choices about her life. How was that for her own good? And what else, I wonder, does she not know?

What is happening to Britney Spears lies at an extreme end of a scale that we brush against every day, when people in ways small and large remind us that they are making choices for us. Somehow, I do not find it comforting to be told they mean well.