Leave Amanda Bynes Alone. Seriously.

Amanda Bynes has been everywhere lately. Sadly, it’s not because of an upcoming film project or television series, but because of her wellness, which appears to be in decline. I am not a doctor, nor is anyone on the LivLuna team, so we cannot diagnose any medical conditions. We are also not a gossip site. We do not wish to perpetuate any negative fodder about Bynes, but we do want to talk about the unfair coverage surrounding her and current state, one that’s all too familiar for many former child stars.

 

Every day, there seems to be a new item about Bynes–getting arrested for posession, tweeting about how she wants Drake to “murder her vagina,” throwing racially charged shade at Rhianna and then deleting it, denying she was involved in a photoshoot where she’s clearly in the photos, etc. But rather than just comment on what’s happening, many blogs seem to want to snark on her, how “crazy” she is, how she needs help, trying to diagnose her, etc. I’ve seen comments from people asking these blogs to stop, and I agree with them–they’re making things worse for Bynes. I believe a lot of it seems to stem from the fact that most people were first introduced to her when she was ten years old, and are now kind of stuck thinking of her as an eternal tween/teen, where she famously delivered quotes about how happy she was to live with her parents, how she wasn’t big on partying, so on and so forth.

 

However, let’s be honest. Bynes is twenty-seven now. She’s not going to be the same as she when she was a teenager. While I agree that there is something off about her behavior, I think that if people let go of the Bynes fromWhat I Like About Youand She’s The Man, they’ll be able to see that she is a woman who is in distress and needs to be helped, not shamed and ridiculed because she grew up. She’s being held to quotes from several years ago.

 

It’s not just her, either–Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus (who brilliantly called out critics for putting her on par with far worse people on SNL a while ago) Lindsay Lohan–are all former child stars who turned into troubled adults. Can we say that fame has had an effect? Mara Wilson seems to think so–yesterday, the former child actress wrote a wonderful piece for Cracked called “7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider’s Perspective),” recalling the time a reporter asked her what she thought about the Hugh Grant/Divine Brown scandal on the red carpet when she was seven, and finding photos of her feet on an adult foot fetish website when she was twelve.

 

While I’m not saying fame is the direct cause, it certainly doesn’t help anything. At the end of her piece, Wilson points out that some movies are starting to use CGI babies and while the technology is flawed, perhaps that will divert parents and kids from wanting to enter a business no one is ever really ready for, let alone a child. So, while Bynes would probably still have her issues whether or not she was a child star, perhaps they wouldn’t be as bad and they definitely wouldn’t be as public.

 

It’s easy to read of Bynes’ recent escapades and roll your eyes and/or comment on blogs, but it isn’t really helping anything. While it is hard to ignore a headline about someone throwing a bong out of a thirty-seven story window, don’t comment on it, don’t joke about it, just keep walking. Allow Bynes to disappear from the press, and maybe she’ll finally realize that the attention she’s receiving isn’t positive, it’s negative and not helping her in any way. Again, I’m aware it’s awkward to say “stop talking about her!” on a blog and I don’t know what her exact issue is, but enough is enough. The entertainment magazines need to stop reporting on her quotes and stop publishing rage inducing articles going into depth about her rough time.

 

Think about it this way–if this were someone you were close to being put on blast when there’s something not right with them, would you be happy knowing that others are getting a cheap thrill out of their issues splashed across a tabloid or a blog? Probably not.

 

So, should we leave Bynes alone, or do you think the negative press will push her into treatment? Or will it just fuel her behavior even further?