Help Against Her Will For Britney Spears Won’t Be Easy
CNN ‘American Morning’ legal analyst Sunny Hostin tells host Kiran Chetry that it isn’t easy to force help on adults who may display mental health problems like Britney Spears to get medical help. “I get calls all the time,” Hostin said. “E-mails, why can’t a family member put someone in against their will? Well, there’s a really good reason for that. You don’t want someone with direct interests in a person’s assets, and their estate, to be able to put them in a mental health hospital, and with Britney, that really would be a problem, because she’s sort of the bread winner of the family. And so if they can say, she’s crazy. Let’s put her in the hospital. Let’s take over all of her assets. We don’t want that sort of thing to happen. So it really has to be a mental health professional or has to be the police, someone that doesn’t have a direct interest in any of her finances.”
Hostin added that in order to be committed, Britney “has to be found to be a danger to herself, a danger to others, like her children, or a gravely disabled, unable to take care of herself, meaning unable to provide care and food, water, shelter for herself. She’s wealthy. That really isn’t going to happen unless she is just so mentally disturbed that she, you know, can’t take care of herself. Really, the law in all states is pretty much the same. It’s very difficult to have someone put in a mental institution against their will.” Watch the segment, aired Friday (January 11), below.
