This week, Millennials around the world took to the internet to celebrate an unofficial holiday: October 3rd, a day devoted to Mean Girls nostalgia. The Tina Fey teen classic from 2004 launched several Hollywood careers and very briefly popularized the term “fetch.” But it also rendered the otherwise ordinary date October 3 forever extraordinary, because it’s on this date in the movie itself that class hunk, Aaron Samuels, turns around to ask smitten 16-year-old Cady Heron, played by a fresh-faced Lindsay Lohan, if she knows what day it is. “It’s October 3rd,” she answers. And with this, 03/10 was seared into collective millennial memory. Fast forward fourteen years to an era where nostalgia is practically a religion and every Oct. 3, this one included, people my age share memes and gifs from the film on social media. Some diehards also wear pink, what is arguably the film’s signature colour, because it’s pink that the movie’s merciless queen bee Regina George (a.k.a. Rachel McAdams) demands her minions don every Wednesday. And luckily enough for those diehards, this year October 3 actually happened to fall on a Wednesday.

Unfortunately though, a person who hasn’t had much luck of late, on October 3, nor any other date, is Lindsay Lohan.

We may celebrate the actress’ bright past, but her present is extremely dark. It’s surreal actually to observe this juxtaposition. On the one hand, this week, you have hundreds of thousands of Mean Girls fans sharing memes of a seemingly healthy, happy Lohan in the early 2000s — a big smile on her freckled face and a promising future before her — and on the other hand you have the reality of that future: a real life Lohan who appears to be dangerously unhinged and in need of immediate medical intervention, but who is instead the butt of media jokes and internet cruelty.

Last week the 32-year-told actress whose post Mean Girls life is mostly a litany of DUI arrests and failed projects, made headlines when she recorded a bizarre video of herself to Instagram, in which she is seen walking the streets of Moscow attempting to snatch a child from what appears to be his family.

Lohan, who is slurring her words in the recording and speaking a combination of English and what sounds like Arabic-inspired gibberish, approaches a group of people she believes are Syrian refugees. They appear to be living on the street, a circumstance Lohan wants to change.

“Do you want to stay in a hotel tonight,” she asks them in English, in an invented accent that sounds Russian with a hint of Quebecois. “Do you want to watch movies? It would be so cool, right?”

When the family doesn’t take Lohan up on her offer but instead walks away, she becomes agitated and follows them, insisting at the very least, that the little boy accompany her to her hotel. “I won’t leave until I take you,” she calls out. “You are ruining Arabic culture.”

It’s around this time that a woman in the group, possibly the boy’s mother, appears to clock Lohan in the head. Lohan, who now claims the family aren’t innocent refugees but child traffickers, breaks down in tears.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so incredibly sad. Like her child star contemporary Amanda Bynes, Lohan is probably battling a host of substance abuse and mental health issues. The actress’ social media posts aren’t a cry for help. They are a thunderous roar. And like Bynes, Lohan is a towering figure in millennial nostalgia, whose past work we relish but whose present existence we mock and ridicule.

Or worse, we judge in bad faith. The most absurd and yet predictable response to Lohan’s outburst in Moscow is the accusation that the actress is a racist suffering from “white saviour complex” and should be dressed down as such. The entertainment site The Daily Edge argues that Lohan’s behaviour in Moscow is indicative of “a typical attitude among those with privilege to not recognize the complexities of an issue such as homelessness.” Or maybe it’s the “attitude” of a person in crisis. Of course Lohan could probably use some sensitivity training on the issue of homelessness — as most of us could. But I’m fairly certain she could use some medical help a whole lot more.

For all my generation’s talk about eroding stigma around mental health and promoting “self-care”, our attitude is not so generous where our fallen stars are concerned. I don’t condone stalking strangers on the street, nor putting on a really bad accent, but perhaps this week of October 3rd we could cut a clearly very messed up Lohan a break. After all, it’s what Cady Heron would do.