Jamie Lynn Spears discusses suffering from OCD and anxiety ‘where I couldn’t function’

Jamie Lynn Spears has opened up about suffering from OCD, depression, and anxiety that grew so ‘all-consuming’ that she ‘couldn’t function’ — and how her daughter’s near-fatal accident spurred her to seek professional help.

The 30-year-old actress and singer has been promoting her new book, Things I Should Have Said, and in a pair of new interviews revealed the extent to which her mental health issues took over her life.

‘The anxiety was to the point where I couldn’t function,’ she told People, adding that she suffered from panic attacks and, at one point, only got out of bed to take her daughter Maddie to school.

She said that she also has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and untreated, her compulsions were ‘consuming my life to the point where it physically was taking over me.’

Jamie Lynn said that she was eventually diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and OCD 

‘It really was like to the point where the panic attacks were all-consuming, where I’m counting, I’m touching the doorknob seven times,’ she told Good Morning America today.’

‘It was consuming my life to the point where it physically was taking over me and I went and finally spoke to a therapist. At the time I took medicine and got back to a place to where I felt stable.’

She also said she has learned some things about herself. 

‘I’m very conscious not to lie to myself anymore because I think that my biggest issue my whole life was pretending to be perfect,’ she said.     

‘Everybody has pressure they put on themselves, but for me, it was on another level because I did have a sister who, in my eyes, was perfect. That pressure felt heavy at times… I was so afraid of letting people down,’ she said.

Jamie Lynn said that what ultimately pushed her to get help was when her daughter Maddie was in a near-fatal accident at age eight in 2017.

Maddie was riding an ATV near a pond on the family’s Louisiana property when she tried to steer away from a drainage ditch.

According to a police report, she ‘overcorrected’ and ended up in the pond — still secured by her seatbelt and trapped to the ATV.

Her parents tried to get her out, though she was ultimately freed by EMTs and brought to the hospital in stable but critical condition.  

‘The biggest thought that I think stays with me, that like haunts me, is that when I was trying to save her — when I thought that I’d lost her — I was so afraid that her last thought was, “Why didn’t Mama save me?”‘ Jamie Lynn told GMA.

She said she thought, ‘I just hope she knows that like I was doing everything I could if that was the last thing that she lived.’

While Maddie was in the ICU, Jamie Lynn had a priest come to pray for her and read the last rites.

Jamie Lynn said that trauma made her reexamine her life, including her mental health struggles. 

‘I think that when your worst fear happens, you get a lot less afraid of everything else,’ she said. 

‘I think that it did it made me reevaluate everything and who I was as a person and where I needed to be better.’ 

Now, she told People: ‘For the first time in my life, I feel OK.’ 

The former Nickelodeon star also reflected on her pregnancy with Maddie when she was just 16, and how damaging the media scrutiny was — saying that it rivaled what her older sister, Britney, faced.  

‘I look back and I think, “Wow, how is this acceptable?”‘ she told GMA. ‘Why are you here other than to shame me and to benefit off of a young girl who’s going through something already so traumatic and so deep and personal? 

‘We say we do better, but now we just go into the comments on Instagram and do it,’ she added.

In her memoir, Jamie Lynn confessed that she felt pressured to make her ‘issue’ disappear.  

‘I think that the easy thing for possibly then would have been like, “Let’s just get this over with and like you go back to being the perfect little sister, because that’s your role,”‘ she said.

However, she did end up keeping her baby, and spent time in a remote cabin with no phone for several weeks to get away from the outside world. 

‘It felt like you’re almost like suffocating. I felt like what was I going to do, I was a kid, and maybe this is in my best interest and maybe this is what I’m supposed to do because of course I don’t want to be, you know, hounded by the paparazzi or the tabloids or allow them to control my narrative. But it felt like I was really being alienated,’ she said.

Jamie Lynn told People that for a while, she struggled with her relationship with Maddie’s dad, Casey Aldridge.

‘I was a teen mom, but I was so programmed to be perfect that I was like, “Wow, I can’t also be a single teen mom,”‘ she said. 

‘More importantly, I wanted my daughter to have what I thought I always wanted: my parents to be together. But then I remembered that my parents might have been together, but it was not a healthy situation. Making that choice was the first time I felt confident to say, “I have to do this for myself.”‘ 

Now a mother-of-two, Jamie Lynn also talked about Britney and the rift that has grown between them. 

Britney recently unfollowed Jamie Lynn on Instagram and has made accusations that her little sister didn’t support her and benefitted from her 13-year conservatorship, which was officially terminated in November.

‘I’ve only ever tried to be helpful, so any notion that says the contrary is just completely ridiculous,’ Jamie Lynn insisted.

She vehemently defended herself against accusations that she failed to assist her sibling in ending the guardianship, which was controlled largely by their father, Jamie.  

‘When [the conservatorship] was put into place I was 17 years old [and] I was about to have a baby so I didn’t understand what was happening nor was I focused on that. I was focused on the fact I was a 17-year-old about to have a baby,’ she said on Good Morning America.  

‘I [understood] just as little about it then as I do now.’ 

However, Jamie Lynn said that she made several attempts to try and help her sibling end the guardianship over the years. 

‘I’ve always been my sister’s biggest supporter so when she needed help I set up ways to do so,’ she said. 

‘[I] went out of my way to make sure that she had the contacts she needed to possibly go ahead and end this conservatorship and just end this all for our family. If it’s going to cause this much discord, why continue it? 

‘It wasn’t about [whether or not I agreed] with the conservatorship; everyone has a voice and it should be heard so if she wanted to talk to other people then I did, I set that up.’ 

Jamie Lynn also revealed that she agreed to speak with Britney’s ‘previous legal team’ to try to aid her sibling in her attempts to end the guardianship. However, she admitted that the conversations ‘didn’t end well in her favor.’

‘I even spoke to her… previous legal team and that did not end well in my favor. I did take the steps to help, but how many times can I take the steps without, you know… she has to walk through the door,’ she explained. 

According to Jamie Lynn, Britney also turned to her to ask for her help in ensuring that her two sons, Sean, 16, and Jayden, 15, were taken care of. 

‘There was a time where my sister asked me — of her trust and will — if I would be the person who assured that her boys got what they needed,’ she said. ‘Whether she is in a conservatorship or not, that was a very normal thing, I thought.’ 

Jamie Lynn went on to speak out about the rift between herself and Britney, insisting that she ‘doesn’t know’ why they are ‘in this position right now’ when all she has ‘ever’ done is ‘love and support’ her sister. 

‘That love is still there 100 per cent,’ she said. ‘I love my sister. I’ve only ever loved and supported her and done what’s right by her and she knows that so I don’t know why we’re in this position right now.’    

While fighting to end her conservatorship, Britney publicly criticized her family — including Jamie Lynn — on a number of occasions, accusing her relatives of failing to support her during her battle to end the guardianship, which was officially terminated by a California judge on November 12. 

In July last year, Britney spoke out about her sister’s performance at the 2017 Radio Disney Music Awards, during which Jamie Lynn performed a remix of her pop star sibling’s song Till the World Ends. 

‘I don’t like that my sister showed up at an awards show and performed my songs to remixes!’ Britney — who was honored at the awards show and was seen in the audience clapping along to her sister’s performance — wrote in a July 17 Instagram post. ‘My so-called support system hurt me deeply!’ 

Two days later, Britney publicly blasted her sister once again in a since-deleted post, in which she described Jamie Lynn as a ‘mean a**’ for failing to stand up to their estranged father. 

Speaking about her sister’s criticism of her Radio Disney performance, Jamie Lynn defended herself once again, insisting that she was ‘confused’ by Britney’s reaction and claiming that she only ever wanted to ‘honor’ the pop star’s legacy. 

‘Honestly, it was somewhat confusing to me about that,’ she said, adding that she has ‘actually spoken to her’ sister about the controversy and believes that Britney was never ‘personally upset with her’. 

‘I was doing a tribute to honor my sister and all the amazing things that she’s done. I have cleared up with the fact that I don’t think she’s personally upset with me about that. Truthfully I don’t know why that bothers her.’ 

When asked about the way in which she describes her sister in her new memoir, Things I Should Have Said, which is due to be published on January 18, Jamie Lynn defended her decision to detail what she refers to as Britney’s ‘erratic, paranoid, and spiraling’ behavior, insisting that she ‘is allowed to say how she felt’. 

‘It was really important to me to first off honor my voice,’ she said. ‘[I felt like] I have to do it or how else can I expect my daughters to stand up for themselves?’ 

Although she said that it wouldn’t be ‘fair’ for her to try and describe Britney’s current ‘state of mind’, she added that she feels as though she has a right to detail how her relationship with her sibling – and her other relatives – impacted her own life over the years. 

‘I’m allowed to say how I felt because that matters. It matters that I was in pain,’ she said.

In her book, Jamie Lynn also speaks out about her estranged father Jamie, now 69, and his ‘struggles with alcohol’, writing that ‘his bouts of drinking always caused me torment and sorrow’. 

Speaking to GMA about her father’s relationship with alcohol, Jamie Lynn admitted that it ‘created a lot of anxiety’ for her, adding that Britney became like ‘another momma’ to her while they were growing up. 

‘For me [my father’s drinking] created a lot of anxiety,’ she recalled. ‘The hardest part was like, “Could I trust you? Are you drinking? Are you not?” It was something that no kid should have to question.’

She added: ‘I adored [Britney], she just felt like everything to me. I felt like she was another momma.’  

Source: Daily Mail