How Britney Spears helped me get through my mental health struggles

In February 2007, pop singer Britney Spears was so close to losing her mind to the press that she shaved her head at a Los Angeles salon for the world to see.

I was only nine years old, but I vividly remember that incident making her the ultimate butt of jokes, even on the elementary school playground. Of course, we were kids too young to understand the implications of such a pop culture circus. But we took our cues from the way the world told us: Britney was a joke, an outcast, a burnout, an embarrassment, not some misguided young woman going through a serious mental crisis. But that didn’t stop the whole world from criticizing her every move.

Even before her highly publicized mental breakdown, I didn’t care much about Britney because the adults around me indicated that her music wasn’t right for me.

The way people talked about Britney back then made me really uncomfortable, and not just because she was the butt of jokes. It was as if her art, and her person, didn’t matter because she made frivolous dance-pop and not “real music.” Listening to that kind of silly pop music was never something boys were encouraged to do, and frankly, the heteronormative public perception of Britney hasn’t changed much since then.

As a kid, I remember feeling decidedly uncomfortable when Pink sang, “What kind of father would hate his daughter if she was gay?” I didn’t quite understand what that meant yet, and I didn’t know I was gay, but I was good at absorbing adult emotions and reactions to pop culture. So when my mom gave me Britney’s Circus, When I got the album on CD the following Christmas, I felt like I’d reached a new milestone in my life: I could actually consume what I was interested in, regardless of age. It was like someone was silently telling me that, at least in private, it was okay to be whoever I wanted to be.

My 11-year-old gay mind couldn’t have known that Britney wasn’t in her prime when she made The Circus and its successors. But when I began to have my own mental health issues in early adulthood, she became an unlikely friend. It all started when I listened to her new album that year, 2016’s Glory, over and over again. The carefree pop songs in which Britney sounded genuinely happy helped recreate those feelings in me.

Britney became my guiding light during a mentally unstable time; her more serious works like Just Luv Me helped me realize that I needed to give myself love and patience. I then added her entire discography to my music library. Whenever I felt like I had no control, anxious, confused, I turned to Britney for comfort. The singer and her music have always been queer-coded for those who need it most, and Britney’s status as a gay icon is almost self-explanatory.

During my second year of college, Britney was the only person who made me feel less alone, to paraphrase the lyrics of Alien. Life only felt slightly more meaningful when listening to her music. The year I turned 19, I became less secretive about my sexual orientation and often felt disillusioned by the reactions of those around me when I tried to stray from my assigned gender role.

But Britney always understood that, as she said in between covers of “My Prerogative,” “People can take everything away from you, but they can’t take away your truth. But the question is, can you take my truth?”

I even wrote poetry about her life for creative writing workshops, and although the real world and its gendered traditions were terrifying and lonely, I knew Britney could stand my truth, and I could stand her truth, at least as it was shared with us at the time.

I’ve revisited media coverage of her early life, researching and identifying moments when she was denied the support and respite she clearly needed. It’s especially harrowing to watch her 2006 appearance on Dateline with the eyes of 2024: When Matt Lauer asked her if she ever wished the media would just leave her alone, she fought back tears and replied, “Yes.” (You’ve probably seen and used this GIF before without question.)

To re-examine the timeline of Britney’s first decade as a star is to chart a course for our own cultural failures and teach impressionable young people that mental health is something to be scorned and laughed at, especially when it comes to women. I was horrified that an artist who had helped me through a dark time wasn’t shown the generosity and compassion she needed during her own dark time. It seemed fitting that Britney named her 2008 album “Circus,” since she was being treated like a zoo animal.

Few adults knew the pain the singer experienced daily under a conservatorship managed by her father. We now know that Britney remained in the system for so long in order to maintain access to her children. In 2019, more than a decade after intense media scrutiny led to her very public breakdown, the world was finally starting to get clues about the unhealthy nature of Britney’s life and career.

But by the time she was released from the conservatorship in 2021, only her truest, most ardent fans remained by her side. The rest of the culture, who hadn’t paid much attention to Spears since she was singing “…Baby One More Time” and “Oops! I Did It Again” on the karaoke machine, criticized her sometimes bizarre Instagram tweets and thought it might have been better for everyone if she had remained in the conservatorship.

When Britney released her autobiography, The Woman In Me, last fall, I felt a great sense of relief, mostly because the book received such rave reviews that it felt like every thoughtful person was finally hearing what I’d always heard: the story of a once-loved woman in trouble, struggling with her mental health, and trying to find her way back to herself in the public eye, amid a minefield of restrictions.

Now that she can finally tell the truth in her own words, I wanted more from her. Selfishly speaking, I can admit my own mental health struggles and look back with much kinder eyes at the 19-year-old gay baby who didn’t know how to take the next step in his journey. After all, many people around the world look to Britney as a fond memory, a cautionary tale from an earlier era of tabloid journalism that was ruthless to young women. You can find unauthorized documentaries about her with a scroll on any streaming service. But we still haven’t been able to give Britney the collective apology she deserves from us.

So I’m going to start anew. Britney, I’m sorry that we tried to treat you like someone else when you were trying to be yourself. I’m sorry that you had to be the center of attention even when you were backed into a corner. I’m sorry that you had to be overprotected when you weren’t protected enough. I’m sorry that you still had to smile when everything was going wrong.

But I mainly Grateful Your music helped me get through my mental health issues while you were dealing with your own.

• They are open Monday to Friday from 9am to 6pm and their phone number is 0300 123 3393.
• The Samaritans offer a 24-hour listening service on 116 123 (UK and ROI – this number is free to call and will not appear on your phone bill).
• CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) runs a helpline (0800 58 58 58) and webchat service which is open 365 days a year from 5pm to midnight.
• The Mix is ​​a free support service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email help@themix.org.uk
• Rethink Mental Illness offers practical support via its advice line on 0808 801 0525 (Monday to Friday 10am to 4pm). For more information, visit rethink.org.