At a time of reassessment of how the media, the entertainment industry and the public have treated female celebrities going through mental health or substance abuse struggles — spurred in part by Ms. Spears’s case — Ms. Bynes offers another example of a young woman raised in the spotlight whose subsequent breakdown was breathlessly covered by tabloids.
In recent years, Ms. Bynes’s life has stabilized, her lawyer said. She is now studying at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles and lives in an apartment community for women “poised to transition into an autonomous lifestyle,” according to papers filed with the court last month that requested Ms. Bynes’s conservatorship be terminated.
“Ms. Bynes desires to live free of any constraint,” the filing said.
The former actress has said little publicly about the conservatorship, aside from a video posted to social media in which she took issue with the cost of her mental health treatment.
Conservatorships, often called guardianships, have received a great deal of public interest as a result of Ms. Spears’s case, disability rights advocates say, and a bill in California making its way through the state legislature would make it easier for conservatorships to be terminated and would require courts and potential conservators to consider alternative options first.
Judy Mark, the president of Disability Voices United, a nonprofit organization that is working to get the legislation passed, said that while she supports the termination of Ms. Spears’s and Ms. Bynes’s conservatorships, she is not seeing it getting easier for a more typical conservatee to assert their freedoms.
“Not everyone has Instagram accounts with millions of followers and a fan base that cares about them,” Ms. Mark said. “Most people conserved are normal people with disabilities, and most courts are very paternalistic.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/arts/television/amanda-bynes-conservatorship.html
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