Amanda Bynes blames drug use for her troubling public behavior

Despite tweeting four years ago that she was "diagnosed bipolar and manic depressive," Amanda Bynes says it was drugs and not mental illness to blame for the troubling public behavior that led to her twice being placed in a protective conservatorship.

"I've been sober for almost four years now," the former child star, 32, who transitioned into adult roles, says in a new Paper magazine interview. Explaining that she began smoking marijuana at 16, she says she "progressed to doing Molly and Ecstasy" and that her drug use became most severe with Adderall, the brand name for the combination of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy.

"I definitely abused Adderall," Bynes says, in addition to what became a daily marijuana habit, "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."

Of her many since-deleted tweets from 2010 through 2014 — in which she said she was retiring from acting, getting married, had a microchip implanted in her brain and, in highly explicit terms, wanted to have sex with rapper Drake, among other missives — Bynes tells the magazine that she is "really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said . . . 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 also blasts "armchair psychiatrists" who had speculated she was schizophrenic, which her attorney said in April 2014 had never been a diagnosis. "It definitely isn't fun when people diagnose you with what they think you are," Bynes says, adding, "Truly, for me, [my behavior] was drug-induced, and whenever I got off of [drugs], I was always back to normal." She concedes her behavior "was so strange that people were just trying to grasp at straws for what was wrong."  

The former star of Nickelodeon's "All That" and "The Amanda Show" and The WB's "What I Like About You," and of movies including "Hairspray" (2007) and "Easy A" (2010) — her last screen work to date — Bynes began her recovery in October 2014 during the second of two parental conservatorships. She has since attended Los Angeles' Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, where she is about to receive an associate's degree in merchandise product development, with plans to move on toward a bachelor's degree.

She says she hopes to return to acting "kind of the same way I did as a kid, which is with excitement and hope for the best."

Bynes has not commented further on Twitter.