Amanda Bynes' best pal fears troubled star will commit suicide or die of drugs overdose

Amanda Bynes' best pal fears troubled star will commit suicide or die of drugs overdose

Even by the standards of Hollywood child stars, Amanda Bynes’s fall from grace has been astonishing.

The former children’s TV favourite had it all until her life completely ­unravelled last month.

She set fire to her trousers in a stranger’s garden and doused her beloved pomeranian dog in petrol. Then Amanda fled in her knickers and T-shirt before being arrested.

The 27-year-old was pictured last month with a sheet over her head while being pushed around a psychiatric hospital in a wheelchair.

Best pal and publicist Jonathan Jaxson fears she will either commit suicide or die of a drugs overdose.

He said: “I fear she is going to end up like Amy Winehouse if she doesn’t get the help she so desperately needs. She is smoking 30-plus joints a day and doing cocaine.

“Then there’s the plastic surgery. In the six months I was trying to do damage control she had several surgeries, they weren’t massive ­operations, usually day-long procedures, but she didn’t need them.”

Amanda Bynes in HairSpray

 

When Amanda was in Hairspray in 2007 it seemed she had successfully made the tricky move from child star to grown-up actress.

But following in the footsteps of former child stars Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan she went into meltdown mode last year.

She drove into a police car in Hollywood while apparently under the influence of drugs.

Two hit-and-run incidents quickly followed and after losing her driving licence she moved to New York.

She begged Jonathan, Kim Kardashian’s former publicist, to help with “damage control”.

He said: “I was happy to help. But once she moved to Manhattan it was chaos. Aside from me, her only real friend is her dog. She treats it like a newborn baby.

“When sober Amanda is the sweetest girl in the world.

“Sadly she is strung out on drugs and paranoid most of the time.

“People say she has mental health problems but I think it’s just the drugs. She doesn’t really drink, she just does drugs all day, every day.

Amanda Bynes as a child in 2000

 

In May, Jonathan called cops when she threatened to kill herself. “I didn’t even know where she was,” he says. “I had to tweet the cops to ask them to keep looking for her as she’d moved apartments and refused to tell me where.

“As they knocked on her door she threw her bong out the window.

“It smashed to pieces on the ground 36 floors below. She could have killed someone and the police arrested her.

“I was trying to help, I feared she was going to harm herself. But it ended in more chaos. Children nowadays want to be ­famous â€" yet Amanda is a walking example of what happens when fame goes wrong.”

After the arrest Amanda stayed at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Manhattan and ran up a £6,000 bill in nine nights before being kicked out.

Cleaners complained she’d trashed her room, pulled out the smoke detectors and left scores of empty pop bottles.

She withdrew thousands of dollars from her bank account and took off for California. Unable to fly without a driving licence or passport, she hailed a taxi. Jonathan said: “She was also trying to get a private jet to take her back to her parents’ in California. Then she went off the radar for almost three days. The next I heard she’d started a fire on a stranger’s drive by her parents’ home.”

Amanda’s lawyers tried to end her two-week detention at the Hillmont Psychiatric Center in California, it was reported this week. But a judge, who heard evidence at the hospital, refused.

Amanda, who starred in TV commercials when she was seven, is the youngest of three children who grew up in the outskirts of Los Angeles. She shot to fame on Nickelodeon at 11 in All That and The Amanda Show but last year she announced she had quit acting â€" to become a rapper.

One of Amanda's many Twitter pics

 

Then she posted topless photos of herself on Twitter and sent sick tirades to President Barack Obama, Miley Cyrus and Rihanna.

The 5ft 8in actress also revealed an obsession with her weight â€" tweeting how she planned to lose 14lbs to get down to seven-and-a-half stone.

She started wearing multi-coloured wigs and dark sunglasses, to cover “bald patches” caused by bleaching her hair.

Dentist dad Rick and wife Lynn said Amanda has blown a third of her £3million fortune in a few months and is obsessed with smoke alarms which she thinks are spying on her.

The couple have gone to court to try to get control of her money so, they claim, they can get her medical help.

In court papers, they described how they got large bills from plastic surgeons as Amanda talked “incessantly” about needing more cosmetic ops.

They added: “She would cover smoke alarms with towels, tape windows shut and cover her car dashboard with cardboard and tape out of fear cameras were watching her.”

Jonathan said: “I haven’t been able to talk to her since she was sent to the psychiatric clinic as they don’t allow calls but I am glad she’s getting help.

“If she could just sober up for a few days she will start to see sense.

“She has many issues to work out â€" including her paranoia about smoke detectors spying on her. At the moment she is like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse rolled into one.”