Is Britney OK? 20 Years On, We Still Don't Know How to Ask

On Sunday, June 21, Britney Spears posted a Father's Day video of herself dancing in a yellow slip dress, twirling with a small guitar she said she bought in Mexico.

The caption, since deleted, read: "It's an emotional day for me,, guitars remind me of baby aliens,, such gentle strings,,, music is said to be the speech of angels,, I bought this one in Mexico in hopes one day I can have another baby."

Within hours the caption was gone but the video stayed up, and the coverage that followed ran hard with one alarming read of it. The Daily Mail's headline: "Britney Spears makes shock baby admission in chaotic Father's Day post," while The Mirror wrote "Britney Spears drops baby comment following odd Father's Day post."

Later that same night, in a separate post, she went further. She wrote that a thief had stolen half her wardrobe and a sum of money from her three years ago, that the response at the time had been that nothing could be done, and that the experience had left her feeling so helpless that it changed her relationship with her own Instagram.

"I will say ever since that happened I 100 percent rebelled on Instagram and showed myself as cheap and probably secretly angry," she wrote.

To most, this seemed like an oversharing spiral, two posts in one night from someone who should maybe just put the phone down.

Nobody can pretend that either of these posts are "normal," and writing them off would be dishonest, especially for a woman with a documented bipolar diagnosis, a DUI arrest in March, and a rehab stay behind her.

But noticing the alarming pattern and knowing what to actually do about it are two different problems. Should behavior like this be reported on at all by the media, or does the reporting itself become part of the spiral, one more aggregation, one more headline, more pressure on someone who has said publicly that the commentary alone affects her?

And who exactly is supposed to be watching, and watching for what?

A conservatorship already tried to be the solution for this issue, by handing total control to a court and a father, and it was a documented catastrophe that took thirteen years to undo. The lesson that was learned was that people do need to pay attention to Britney’s well-being, but that the conservatorship was the wrong kind of attention because it was total, controlling, financially motivated, and did real damage.

But what is the appropriate medium between total oversight and total absence?

This is where the debate usually splits into camps, and neither one is actually answering the question of how Britney should be monitored. One side, often the same fans who fought hardest to free her, has in places calcified into something closer to surveillance, parsing every frame of her life for proof that the threat never really ended, that someone (management) is still controlling her, that the woman dancing isn't even fully her own and an image that management wants out — which makes no sense to me when her social media isn’t an image most managers would choose for their client.

This camp seems obsessed with blaming someone for what’s happening to Britney, but just shifting targets from her father to her now manager, Cade Hudson, whom anonymous fans accuse of being an enabler, not a genuine support system.

The other side practices a kind of fashionable dismissal, the idea that any concern is unnecessary, that the correct response to every post is to look away entirely, the way the Britney fan Chris Crocker begged us in 2007 in his sobbing plea to "Leave Britney Alone."

Looking away is exactly what let things get as bad as they did for over a decade before anyone with real authority noticed.

So the real question is whether reporting on moments like this does any good, and whether anyone should be keeping watch at all after a conservatorship that itself was deemed abusive. If the answer is yes, what should that watching look like now that nobody holds the legal authority to act on what they see?

We went and asked the people who would actually know, those close to her, mental health experts, and even a fan who has her own theories on social media. What we found complicates the comfortable answer on both sides.

This story outlines:

• Her sons’ role in her recovery
• What experts think of her current treatment and the best path forward for her
• Her current relationship with her family
• How her management treat her
• How the Elton John collaboration happened
• The truth about the sale of her back catalog
• How fans’ critiques of her social media affects her
• How her social media works
• Could she ever perform again?

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