Brittney Spears’ Testimony Reminds Me of Being Hospitalized Against My Will — And it Scares Me

Eight years ago, I was sitting on an emergency room exam table when a social worker came in and sat matter-of-factly on a chair opposite me.

She flipped through some notes before looking up. Our conversation was brief, quickly leading to what she came to tell me: You’re being hospitalized, she told me. Immediately.

So I asked her: “Can’t I say no?”

“No,” she told me. Just that. No.

I had come to the ER because I was depressed, and because I had tried to hurt myself. Still, I was frustrated. I had recently been hospitalized. I didn’t think hospitalization would help anything — it hadn’t before. I was working on paying off the thousands of dollars for that hospitalization, too. And I was a teacher, and didn’t have any sub plans for my classes. Who would even cover my classes the next day?

They took away everything. They took my phone, my wallet. They took my clothes away to inspect. During the previous hospitalization, after this process, I had been given a thin hospital gown to wear. A tech took me into my hospital room bathroom — a bathroom with a door cut low on the top and high on the bottom, and that didn’t lock. She told me to lift the gown above my waist, squat, and cough. I was horrified. I had never been naked in front of anyone since I was a small child (and too young to remember it). I had never even had a pelvic exam. I remember squeezing my eyes shut and holding my breath, telling myself: I’m not here, this isn’t happening, this isn’t real. All this when I was at one of the lowest points of my life — low enough that I was suicidal. It made everything that night all the more horrific. It made me wonder why I was being treated like a criminal, when all I was guilty of was a mental health diagnosis.

I recently read Britney Spears’ heartbreaking testimony about the confinement of the conservatorship she’s been placed under for the last thirteen years. I read how she spoke about not being allowed to set her own performance schedule or rest when she was ill, how she was forced to attend and pay for expensive residential treatment, how she hasn’t been allowed to have another child or get married or even ride in her boyfriend’s car.

My experience has never been as extreme as hers. But I have had the experience of control of my own life being taken away from me because of a struggle with mental health. And reading about what Britney Spears has experienced reminded me of the humiliation and horror of that happening.

As a society, we’ve had other recent exposure to individuals being deemed unworthy of control not because of a crime, but because of their mental health. In *This is Paris, Paris Hilton talks about her time as a teenager at Provo Canyon School, in my home state of Utah, an organization whose current website describes as a “compassionate behavioral health center.” She describes being pulled out of her bed and taken away from her home in the middle of the night, of male staff members watching her shower, of being placed in solitary confinement — and of dreams of these experiences that still keep her up at night. In the recent Netflix film [I Care a Lot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Care_a_Lot), *we watch a fictionalized story of a lucid, competent, and intelligent older woman being declared by a court as incompetent, a decision that leads to her effective imprisonment in a care center (complete with her cell phone being taken away and access to a lawyer denied). The story is fiction, but reporting from Esquire informs us the movie “shows a very real legal system ripe for exploitation.”

The United States prides itself on being a country with “liberty and justice for all,” to quote the pledge I recited every day as a school child. But Britney Spears’ testimony is just one more demonstration of how often this isn’t true.

As someone who also lives with mental health struggles, her experience makes me afraid.