Danielle Levitt for PAPER
Comeback alert!
Amanda Bynes appears on the new cover of
Paper magazine, and goes into detail about her drug use, battle with depression, and that infamous mental breakdown.
Now healthy, four years sober, and working towards a career in both fashion and movies, the former child star wants to come clean about how things got so off track.
Her battle with mental illness began after she starred in
She's The Man, which required her to transform herself into a boy for the role.
"When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn't like how I looked when I was a boy. I've never told anyone that. It was a super strange and out-of-body experience. It just really put me into a funk," she admitted.
Her body image issues only continued when she was cast in
Hairspray, and read an article about how girls abused the ADD drug Adderall to lose weight.
"They were talking about how women were taking it to stay thin. I was like, 'Well, I have to get my hands on that.' When I was doing
Hall Pass, I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [higher that way]. I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines. Or memorize them, for that matter," she explained.
Thus began her deep dive into illegal drugs. She eventually quit
Hairspray because of her troubles, but was cast again in
Easy A later on. Still, her insecurities persisted, and only heightened her feelings of wanting to use.
"I literally couldn't stand my appearance in that movie and I didn't like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it. I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me. I don't know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things," she said.
Things only got darker from there, as she began to experiment with cocaine and ecstasy and continued to pop Adderall.
"I never liked the taste of alcohol. [I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice, but I definitely abused Adderall. I had a lot of time on my hands and I would 'wake and bake' and literally be stoned all day long," she detailed, noting that she began to start "hanging out with a seedier crowd" and isolated herself from loved ones. "I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me," she added.
On top of all of this, she discovered Twitter, and began to self-destruct publicly on the social media platform.
"I'm really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can't turn back time but if I could, I would. And I'm so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me. It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad. Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter... It was like an alien had literally invaded my body," she revealed.
Now that she's sober, she can see how much the drugs and "experimenting" destroyed her life.
"My advice to anyone who is struggling with substance abuse would be to be really careful because drugs can really take a hold of your life. Everybody is different, obviously, but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain. It really made me a completely different person. I actually am a nice person. I would never feel, say or do any of the things that I did and said to the people I hurt on Twitter. There are gateway drugs—and thankfully I never did heroin or meth or anything like that—but certain things that you think are harmless, they may actually affect you in a more harmful way. Be really, really careful because you could lose it all and ruin your entire life like I did," she cautioned.
This takes a lot of bravery, and we're so glad she finally made it out on the other side!
