Amanda Bynes Opens Up About Drugs, Twitter, and Her Public Meltdown

The 32-year-old, who broke out big on Nickelodeon before very publicly melting down, is now four years sober and getting candid about hitting rock-bottom.

Bynes admits she started using marijuana at 16, and a few years later graduated to molly and ecstasy.

Amanda told the mag, “I definitely abused Adderall,” explaining that around 2007 she heard it was “the new skinny pill” and faked ADD symptoms to get a prescription.

The abuse escalated and Bynes recalled spiraling on the set of the movie "Hall Pass” in 2010. “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 also started “tripping out” over her appearance and feeling like she looked overweight on-screen.

Amanda ended up exiting the project, calling it a “mixture of being so high that I couldn't remember my lines and not liking my appearance.”

Her self-criticism continued with the hit “Easy A,” and she said, “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.”

She famously retired from acting on Twitter, and from there she says she felt adrift. “I just had no purpose in life. I'd been working my whole life and [now] I was doing nothing.” She added, “I had a lot of time on my hands and I would 'wake and bake' and literally be stoned all day long.”

Essentially she “was just stuck at home, getting high, watching TV, and tweeting.”

Amanda's bizarre tweets gained a lot of attention, and she now says she's “ashamed and embarrassed” by what she wrote.

“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,” she said. “Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter.”

After some arrests and other newsworthy incidents, some people worried about her mental health. She tells Paper, “Truly, for me, [my behavior] was drug-induced, and whenever I got off of [drugs], I was always back to normal… I know that my behavior was so strange that people were just trying to grasp at straws for what was wrong.”

Amanda got sober and credits her parents for helping her stay on track. Bynes is now attending classes at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

She wants to get back into acting, and says, “Those days of experimenting [with substances] are long over. I'm not sad about it and I don't miss it because I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act. When I was off of them, I was completely back to normal and immediately realized what I had done — it was like an alien had literally invaded my body. That is such a strange feeling.”