Amanda Bynes: train wreck in action, and journalists misdiagnose.
Grown-up child alkie of the month:
Former child star Amanda Bynes, 28, getting her second DUI and, again, put under the conservatorship of her mother. In the space of two years, she’s made a mess of her life. Two years ago, she sideswiped a police car and was charged with DUI; separately, she was charged with two hit and run incidents. In another incident, a DUI charge was dropped only because she pled out to reckless driving; after that, she was cited for driving with a suspended license. Off the road, she was arrested for criminal possession of marijuana, tampering with evidence and reckless endangerment for throwing a bong out the window of her 36th floor Manhattan apartment (she claimed it was a vase). Two days later she accused the arresting officer of sexual harassment. In Thousand Oaks, California, she allegedly started a fire in the driveway of a stranger’s house. Aside from her latest DUI, she accused her father of repeated sexual abuse when she was a child, only to retract her statement two days later, tweeting, “The microchip in my brain made me say those things but he’s the one that ordered them to microchip me.” That got her a psychiatric hold and now everyone thinks she’s crazy. How about starting with, “Let’s get her sober and make her stay that way?” and watch the crazy behavior dissipate. Please, someone coerce abstinence, lest my prediction comes true that she slips into a “let’s have multiple plastic surgeries” stage of addiction, where addicts can go overboard.
Codependent journalists of the month:
Journalists, informing readers that Amanda Bynes has a mental illness, when they should instead point to her behaviors and suggest she has the disease of addiction. They are welcome to say she may have or, more likely, may have triggered a mental disorder, but we cannot know this until she is clean and sober for at least several years.