‘Star Wars’ Child Actor in Mental Health Rehab Following “Psychotic Break,” Mother Says

Zoe G Phillips
·2 min read
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Jake Lloyd, the actor known for portraying young Anakin Skywalker in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, has been in a mental health facility for almost a year, his mother shared this week.

“Jake started having some trouble in high school,” Lisa Lloyd told Scripps News. “He started talking about ‘realities.’ He didn’t know if he was in this reality or a different reality. I didn’t really know exactly what to say to that.”

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Lisa said Jake is now 10 months into an 18-month stay at a mental health rehabilitation facility following what she described as a full-blown psychotic break in March 2023, when he turned his car off in the middle of a three-lane road.

Lisa said doctors initially suggested her son could have bipolar disorder but that treatment never seemed to work, and Jake often refused to take medication. He was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

“When they finally told him, it totally threw him off into an even worse depression,” she said of the diagnosis. “It was really hard.”

Jake, now 35, graduated from high school in 2007 and initially enrolled in classes at Columbia College Chicago, Lisa continued.

“He missed a lot of classes, and he was telling me that people were following him,” she said of her son in college. She also recalled a 2015 incident in which Jake led deputies on a multi-county chase before crashing his car and recounted situations in which he would claim to see people with “black eyes” staring at him in public and engage in conversations with Daily Show host Jon Stewart through the TV screen.

The situation, however, appears to have turned hopeful. “He’s doing much better than I expected,” Lisa said of Jake’s stay at the rehab facility. “He is relating to people better and becoming a little bit more social, which is really nice. It’s kind of like having more of the old Jake back because he has always been incredibly social until he became schizophrenic.”

Two decades later, Jake is still a Star Wars fan. “People think Jake hates Star Wars,” Lisa said. “He loves it.”

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