Britney Spears Helped Me Through My Mental Health Struggles

LOADING ERROR LOADING In February 2007, pop singer Britney Spears was pushed to the brink of her sanity by the media. It started with listening and relistening to her new album from that year, 2016’s “Glory.” The carefree pop songs where Spears sounded genuinely happy helped mimic that emotion in me. To watch her 2006 appearance on “Dateline” with 2024 eyes is particularly harrowing: When Matt Lauer asks if she ever wishes the media would just leave her alone, she chokes back tears before replying, “Yeah.” To reexamine the timeline of Spears’ first decade of stardom is to chart a course of our own cultural failings, teaching impressionable young minds that mental health, especially when it comes to women, is something to demean and laugh at. The rest of the culture, those who hadn’t paid much attention to Spears since the days of singing “… Baby One More Time” and “Oops! Once Spears published her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” last fall, it brought me a great deal of peace — mostly because the high praise for the book felt like everyone with a heart and a mind was finally hearing what I always heard: a once-beloved woman in trouble, struggling with her mental well-being, trying to find a way back to herself in the public eye amid a land mine of restraints.