MINTZ: We Need to Talk About Amanda Bynes

When I say the name Amanda Bynes, who comes to mind? Is it the Amanda Bynes of 2002, the cute, funny star of “The Amanda Show” who carried an entire Saturday Night Live-esque television show by herself? Is it the Amanda Bynes of “She’s the Man,” pretty and talented and seemingly not going off on a Lindsay Lohan downward spiral? Or is it the Amanda Bynes of recent times, with the bizarre tweets and the ever-changing hair? The Amanda Bynes whose name is followed by a slightly nervous laugh and an “oh, Amanda Bynes? She’s crazy now.” Is it that Amanda Bynes?

Because we need to talk about that Amanda Bynes.

Looking at it objectively (well, as objectively as one can look at another person’s repeated descent into mental illness), Amanda Bynes’s Twitter is entertaining. Her since deleted, “I want Drake to murder my vagina” tweet from early 2013 is pretty much iconic by now. I remember my reaction the day that tweet made its rounds around the Internet. I was in my junior year of high school, sitting in my car with my friends before class. We all laughed, but brushed it off because maybe she was hacked, or maybe it was an isolated incident of poor judgment. Every one of my friends in the car that day retweeted the tweet as a joke, a “ha-ha, look at this girl we all used to watch on television tweeting something weird,” and that was the end of that.

But then there were more tweets, strange, unfounded assertions of stalking and multiple arrests for driving under the influence. Amanda Bynes was going through a textbook mental breakdown: paranoid delusions, erratic behavior, reckless drug and alcohol abuse. But it was not seen as something that required hospitalization; it was seen as a funny joke. We all laughed at her ridiculous antics and pictures and ignored the fact that if this was happening to one of our friends or family members, we would be seriously concerned.

Articles that came out around the time of Amanda Bynes’s first breakdown primed us to laugh at what she’s going through and trivialize her struggles, just because she’s doing ridiculous things such as purposefully locking herself in the bathroom at a cupcake shop and banging her head repeatedly against the wall. These are the behaviors of someone who is incredibly mentally ill and refusing treatment, and we thrust her into the spotlight like a circus monkey and watched to see what she would do. Imagine if this spectacle was your best friend or your sister, instead of someone you are so removed from. Imagine the helplessness you’d feel as you looked on in fear for her life while everyone was just waiting to see what she’d do next. Would you be laughing?

Luckily, Amanda Bynes’s parents caught up with her and placed her into psychiatric hold, where she was reportedly diagnosed with bipolar disorder (you can check out my column last week to see my thoughts on that particular illness). All of her strange tweets were deleted, and she was quiet until March 2014, when she tweeted that she was studying at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and doing well. However, in October, things started to get bizarre again. Over the course of two days, she went on a Twitter rant saying that she is suing In Touch Weekly for lying about her and that she is ugly and needs plastic surgery and that her dad molested her when she was little and implanted a microchip in her brain to monitor her thoughts. And again, we as a society began to laugh, because again, we took her descent into madness as a joke.

Amanda Bynes’s downward spiral was loud, as bipolar disorder usually is. It was and continues to be a messy and ridiculous spectacle. But there has been another display of mental illness in recent media, one that shook us to our core: Robin Williams. Williams, one of the greatest actors of all time, committed suicide on Aug. 11. Tears were shed over another great talent lost to the quiet, isolating nightmare that is depression. It was and continues to be a horrible loss. The response to this tragedy was a sympathetic media and a public that pushed mental health awareness. Nowhere was Williams ridiculed or demonized or joked about.

The same people who were crying about Robin Williams are laughing at Amanda Bynes. The same people who said we all need time to grieve Williams’ death are the ones making Bynes’s illness into a punch line. We need to talk about Amanda Bynes because mental illness is a lot of things: it is scary, isolating, powerful and dangerous. But it is not a spectator sport.