So is Amy Winehouse manic or what?

How long's this been going on then? When 'Beth' met Amy in Texas last year at South by Southwest, the girl seemed to be fine. Happy, carrying her hot sauce, her hair was clean and shining. Certainly not in the state that she's in now. That all seemed to begin again later in the summer. How is it possible that she's slid into the state that she's now in? Of course, when you're manic and in denial and hooked on drugs as self-medication, then no one can help. No one is going to make her better or cure her. The only person who can is she herself and she doesn't look as though she believes enough in her future to want to stop. The drugs and the booze and the obsessive behaviours are indicative of someone sliding out of control.

So 'Zach' knows them all on the periphery. His life, to some extent, parallels hers. The music, the madness, the drugs, the extremity of living their lives on the edge of a precipice. She's lucky; she has the financial recourses to help herself if she wants. Zach doesn't. He now has to rely on the NHS and that's a hiding to nothing.

Amy's parents: read my book. Understand what Bipolar disorder is and recognise that even installing the largest, tallest, toughest minder is not going to stop someone intent on self destruction. Telling people not to give Amy cigarettes? For real? Is that the best you think you can do? Let her be charged and imprisoned for offences that anyone in the real world would have been by now. That's the only way she will attempt a reconciliation with herself. Stop giving interviews and let her fall as low as she can go without attempting to pick her up each time she ends up in the gutter.