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Amy Winehouse Not The Brightest Button in The Box

Dear Editor, With reference to Amy Winehouse's Depravity Has Driven Her to Brink of Bankruptcy, by Robert Paul Reyes.

I kinda agree with your sentiments Robert, but surely there is depth to this tale of woe. Amy is without doubt a gifted entertainer and a natural songbird, but she's not the brightest button in the box. I actually think she is emotionally retarded, not simply immature.

I suspect she has a host of mental hangups, such as OCD. Considering the base from which she started out, the broken family, and chav London education, and those school bullies are wicked. When Mitch naively addresses the problems that drug abusers face getting help, he should consider his own responsibility in his poor parenting.

The problems with mental illness in our young folk run parallel with the same causes and symptoms of drug usage and abuse. The same lack of government resources to help the young escape from mental health issues. Aside from drastic, almost punitive action, sectioning and internment in institutions where patients are often abused by other patients and staff, and the treatment with dodgy psychoactive drugs, there isn't any real help.

Charities struggle to offer part time counselling mostly ineffective. You could say that broken youngsters that turn to drugs are in fact self medicating. With that as the background you have to now take the pressure that meteoric fame, and celebrity status bring as the sting in the tail, that test any relationship to breaking point. How many celebs maintain stable lasting relationships?

Can we name more than three? Can we even name three? Now just to make it more 'exciting', aside from the nutjobs that want to get their leg over Amy, the hordes of ever hopefuls, the adoring fans, let's add the loonies, the homicidal nutjobs who want a piece of her. But we're not finished. AlQueda ragheads want to kill her in a public way, being of Jewish stock and rather famous with it, she is high on a list of Jews to be assasinated. Security doesn't come cheap... how much do you think Madonna forks out for it?

The UK taxpayer is hosting and protecting the ex President of Pakistan here in London at a cost of I think it was stated as £3000 a week. Ok so that's 'only' £160k a year. Even if you had £10M don't you think you might be a little paranoid. There is the ever present risk of kidnap for ransom, or death. It's only because she is stupid that she persists in putting herself at risk in regular haunts that are well known. She must be a nightmare to close protect.

I should have a gripe as I, like many others had tickets for her no-show comeback gig at Shepherds Bush earlier this year. I'd been looking forward to that for months whilst enduring treatment for my life threatening cancer. I'm sure it gave me, I know this is sad by the way, extra reason to make it through, and then she tossed us aside.

However I have a talented daughter of 30 with mental health issues resulting from bullying at school. I'm 64 and have seen a bit of this life and I would say to you as I would anyone, do not judge until and unless you have been in that same place and time. Many things in your life will come as a profound shock, it could never happen to you, until it does. You have to live it to know it. Lighten up, the kid is a clown, and she knows it. She's probably bipolar too, a manic depressive.

Question: Why is that different than being born with a physical defect? Answer: ... it isn't.

Dave