As of today Britney Spears loses her kids according to the L.A. County Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon.

My reaction is probably likes yours: Part of me says, “Well I sure as hell hope this wakes her up to her path of self-destruction, because if this isn’t hitting bottom, I don’t know what is!” And the other (slightly more compassionate) part says, “Oh man, do I feel for this woman. Here she is fighting a mental illness and enslaved by addiction. What a prison of hell she’s living in.”

This is exactly why Dr. Ken Duckworth, M.D., medical director for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), whom I interviewed last summer through a Revolution Health blogger call (which I’ve been publishing in bite sizes the last two Fridays ), said he felt for families dealing with a person with dual-diagnosis, a family member who simultaneously fighting a mental disorder and an addiction.
According to Dr. Duckworth, the complication exists because the cultures of treatment are so different, which he explains in the first part of my interview with him.

In the substance abuse culture, the person is generally viewed as the agent of the problem, and they are held accountable and have consequences for their relapses. In the mental illness culture, the person is often viewed not as the agent of the problem, but as the victim of their illness. We tend to hold people a little less accountable for bio-chemical processes.
Now what I have experienced, when the person has both substance abuse and a mental illness, people don’t know how much to do for the person, and how much to have them be accountable, and to have them learn from their mistakes because in this case, when you have both together, the mistakes could easily be lethal.
You can see this dichotomy. And when I work with families dealing with both conditions, my heart really goes out to them because in the AA world, and in the substance abuse culture, they are encouraged to have the person hit bottom and be accountable, but that’s not the case in the mental health world.

So here we are with Britney. Do we yell, “Serves you right! Get serious about your sobriety!” Or do we embrace her, saying, “Come to mama and be comforted.”
I think the reason why we, as a culture, are obsessed with Britney’s custodial issue and Lindsay Lohan’s run-ins with the law because they represent the familiar struggles we fight within ourselves and with family members every day.
In a recent McLatchy-Tribune story, I read this:

For millions of ordinary Americans struggling to free themselves from alcohol addiction, the story of dissolute starlet Lindsay Lohan inspires not self-satisfied tut-tutting but rather a grimly familiar dread. Despite decades of research and dozens of potential treatments, alcoholism, American’s most common addiction, remains notoriously difficult to overcome.
More than 30 percent of American adults have abused alcohol or suffered from alcoholism at some point in their lives, according to a new study released this month by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a branch of the National Institutes of health.
Yet only a quarter of those afflicted received any treatment. And other studies who that, at best, only a quarter of those who seek treatment manage to abstain from alcohol for a year.

Aside from the challenge of staying dry, the deeper dilemma, for me at least, is where a mental disorder ends and addiction begins in a person like Britney. Since I suffer from both, I’m especially intrigued by the combination of symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments. In general, the same recovery efforts that I put forth to stay sane and achieve mental stability are the tools I employ to maintain my sobriety: supportive friends, a healthy diet, sleep hygiene, omega-3 pills, prayer, service to others, therapy, eliminating unnecessary stress, and so forth.
It frustrates me to see Britney self-destruct, even though I can surely understand it. Lord knows I’m not always moving in the right direction, And even though I’m not high on whatever she is pushing a double stroller, there were certainly times in my depression that I shouldn’t have been operating a vehicle with two children in the back.
Every time I’m tempted to throw a stone, I remember Craig Ferguson’s poignant monologue on the topic, which I’ll sum up by saying, “There but by the grace of God, go I.”