Following her Maui vacation, Britney Spears is speaking out again and “staying healthy” after the end of the 13-year conservatorship that she says took a toll on her physically and mentally, including depression and what she thought might’ve been cancer.
In a since-deleted Instagram post on Thursday (Feb. 10), Spears shared a lengthy statement via screenshots from her Notes app, first gushing over the “private hidden caves” and “outside showers” at the resort she stayed at while in Hawaii. She then went on to note that she spent a lot of her trip focusing on her fitness and aiming to “dedicate myself to it.”
“That’s the whole thing depression can keep you from doing,” she added of putting herself first. “That was the whole thing when my family did what they did to me … holding me against my will … which they say was HELP !!!!”
She continued that she does “believe in help but not arrogantly unasked for help,” saying that “the only thing honestly disturbing about me is depression …. but you don’t take people out of their homes for that !!!!”
Spears went on to discuss her experience in a mental health facility. While she didn’t reveal which incident she was referring to, she could be talking about April 2019, when she checked into a program after revealing that she was taking an indefinite hiatus ahead of her planned Domination residency in Las Vegas. While she was in treatment, the #FreeBritney movement began to rise, as rumors circulated that she was being held in the facility against her will.
“Depression is getting stuck in dark moments in your head … well … that whole four month experience amplified my depression by 100 !!!!” she wrote. “The people who worked for me stood at the doors saying I couldn’t go anywhere … cus it seemed to me like some sick joke when I would call and say I’d been working here for two weeks … when can I have the keys to my car and go home ???”
She added that she was told she needed to remain in a treatment for two months, and then go to another facility for another month, without telling her when she’d be able to return home. Spears recalled sitting “in a chair for 8 hours a day” and giving “like 8 gallons of blood a week.”
“My family f—ing killed me and that’s exactly what I thought … I thought that or either it was just a sick joke,” she said. Spears continued that she was “too nice” and “felt suffocated” during her conservatorship, and has chosen to share her story to let her fans know that the medical system “can be a ploy to make others NOT better … to make them more sick so they can stay on board and profit.”
“At one point I thought … wait do I have cancer and they don’t want me to know and this is some secret therapy for people with cancer???” she wrote, saying that she got “extremely ill” in the facility and “couldn’t talk” because she was “on a high dose of lithium.”
“It was demoralizing,” she wrote. “I wanted to kick and scream all of it but my family sat back and acted as if I was not a big deal !!!”
“Now I would spit in their faces,” she said. “My one regret in life and my whole 40 years if I could go back in time I would spit in their stupid f—ing faces !!! I would be the first person to admit I’m pretty messed up by it all and haven’t even come close to sharing all of what they did … it’s honestly shocking but in time I think things will unfold in a bright way !!!”
Britney concluded that she’s “taking it a day at a time” as she recovers from what she endured during her conservatorship.
During the star’s public testimony in her conservatorship case on June 23, Spears told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny that a therapist had taken her off her “normal meds” and prescribed lithium instead, and how she wanted to “sue my family” for “what they did to me.” She told the judge of her family, “I want to be able to be heard on what they did to me by making me keep this in for so long, it is not good for my heart. I’ve been so angry and I cry every day, it concerns me, I’m told I’m not allowed to expose the people who did this to me.”
Since the judge officially ended her conservatorship on Nov. 12, Spears has been opening up on social media about what she experienced while under the conservatorship. That includes calling out her family on Instagram, as well as a public spat with sister Jamie Lynn Spears that involved the pop star’s lawyer sending the Zoey 101 star a cease and desist letter.