The Paper profile is revealing in a handful of ways. First, there are the photographs, the medium through which Bynes’s decline was so visibly and persistently chronicled. In the cover photo, the fashion student and aspiring designer is dressed conservatively, in a checked blazer and jeans. Bynes seems cautious in most of the images, as she did a year ago in her first broadcast interview since her hospitalization, a strange and uncomfortable video in which the YouTube personality Diana Madison asked Bynes to rank other former child stars in order from “hot” to “not.” She smiles in only one of the Paper photos, as a stylist adjusts an elaborately beaded blouse underneath her hair. Bynes looks almost like her pre-2010 self there: animated, wholesome, and at ease.

To the question of what exactly happened to her, Bynes swats away the armchair diagnoses from online authorities that she suffered from some kind of psychotic break or mental-health disorder, stating instead that she had been smoking marijuana since the age of 16, and that abusing Adderall for weight-loss purposes precipitated her breakdown. On the set of the movie Hall Pass in 2010, she recalls, “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 was replaced in the role by Alexandra Daddario—the first sign of trouble in Bynes’s career.

What also seems apparent, though, is that Bynes’s entire life on-screen left her with a kind of body dysmorphia that drugs made worse. Seeing herself dressed as a boy in the 2006 movie She’s the Man, she tells Schreiber, sent her into “a deep depression” for more than four months. A screening for Easy A, her last film appearance, prompted a drug-induced fit of self-loathing. “I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance,” she says. “I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.” She announced that she was retiring from acting on—where else?—Twitter, only to retract the claim shortly after.

It was at this point, in 2010, that Bynes began the process of dismantling the public facade that years of TV shows and teen movies and red carpets had built. If Spears’s head-shaving moment forced America to see what the weirdness of child stardom and a life of being physically dissected really look like, Bynes’s Twitter account did the same thing. Her unfiltered thoughts were dark, jarring, comically absurd. She constantly assessed people by whether they were pretty enough, young enough, still hot. She disparaged public figures from Miley Cyrus to Barack and Michelle Obama as being “ugly.” To Jenny McCarthy, she wrote, “I’m 27, u look 80 compared to me!”

The response from bloggers and news sites at the time was to treat Bynes’s outbursts as a good joke, just like her increasingly strange appearance. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then any recent snapshot of Amanda Bynes would just say ‘WTF’ 1,000 times,” an E! post from 2013 compiling “her biggest Twitter feuds” reads. The gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who documented Bynes’s misadventures relentlessly, similarly rounded up her “most bizarre yet entertaining tweets.” He also posted a list of recent headlines on his site relating to Bynes, which illustrates the kind of obsessive scrutiny that Bynes faced at the tail end of her acting career.

Bynes, in her Paper profile, apologizes wholeheartedly. She takes ownership for making decisions that led to behavior that she says is entirely out of character for her. Having been sober for almost four years, she wants people to learn from her experiences. “Everybody is different, obviously,” she says, “but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain. It really made me a completely different person. I actually am a nice person. I would never feel, say, or do any of the things that I did and said to the people I hurt on Twitter.”