Just how unhinged is Britney Spears? Is she suffering from some kind of pedestrian, drug-fueled, stressed-out madness, or is she legitimately bonkers? Like padded-room bonkers. Strait-jacket bonkers. Does she belong in a psycho-ward instead of rehab? Would shock-treatments help? What exactly is going on with that girl? Nobody knows. Except the British tabloid News of the World, which has all the dope on Britney's breakdown. Everything that happened from the time she confronted Federline up till now. And details about Britney's psychological state even before the umbrella meltdown? They've got those too. They've got everything. It all sounds like bullshit, but they've got it.
All right, where to start? Well, how about the Federline confrontation. We all knew that, the night of the umbrella incident, Britney went to see Federline, and there was some kind of fight that ended in Britney being convinced to re-enter rehab lest she lose her children. What we didn't know is that, having been turned away by Federline because she was acting so crazy and scaring the kids, Britney called Kevin and offered him $200,000 in exchange for dropping the emergency hearing he wanted to hold. Kevin, loving fellow that he is, turned down the money, and insisted Britney get serious about rehab instead. And she has been in treatment ever since.
But will that treatment be enough? Friends of Britney fear entering rehab is really just a way of avoiding more serious options. Like commitment to a psychiatric institution. Britney's pals have related harrowing stories of her behavior in recent weeks. Says one friend:
She spends every night in floods of tears. She lies there, sobbing her heart out to the blackness. You can hear her crying and crying with these deep sobs that echo around the house. Her security guards have to listen to it because she's got them sleeping outside her room—she's that fearful for her own safety. Then in the morning she gets up and goes through her room and all her belongings to search for bugs. She's convinced that everyone is out to get her and that her thoughts are being recorded. And the smallest thing can set off a fully-blown panic attack. She gets this fearful look in her eyes and starts trembling all over, dripping with sweat and gasping for breath and she looks like she's going to faint at any time. It's absolutely terrifying to see. It is the behaviour of someone who has completely lost their mind.
Wow - Britney's batty. So batty in fact that Promises, the rehab center, has her on suicide watch. And allegedly, UCLA's psychiatric hospital has a bed reserved for her should she completely break down.
So is Britney really suicidal? We heard stories about her trying to kill herself by running in front of traffic, and being saved at the last minute by her pals. But, supposedly, that wasn't the end of her desperate behavior. Shortly after the traffic incident, Britney reportedly held up two bottles of Tylenol and screamed, "I'm gonna do this, this is it! I'm through with the whole fucking circus!" But one of Britney's friends was able to talk her out of doing herself in.
And then there's this: During Britney's first, one-day foray into Promises, the staff there suspected the singer had smuggled some cocaine into the facility, and therefore searched her. But what they found wasn't drugs; in fact it was more disturbing: a list Britney had written naming people she wanted to see dead, including Federline and certain members of the paparazzi. Said Britney's friend:
When the staff confronted her she just burst into tears. She was crying uncontrollably — she's now such a broken woman. They had to strip search her afterwards to make sure she didn't have drugs on her body. Then the list was quietly disposed of. Britney just turns this stuff over and over in her mind. She has dark fantasies about terrible things happening to her enemies.
Scary - if it's true. But I would tend to doubt a lot of it. It sounds like tabloid sensationalism to me. Of course, Britney's life has become so crazy, the reality may actually surpass the fabrications of yellow journalists. In time, we may learn that fiction has nothing on the truth.
