Jake Lloyd‘s mother broke her silence on the former Star Wars star’s mental health struggles.
Lisa Lloyd revealed to Scripps News on Monday, March 11, that Jake, 35, has been in a mental health rehabilitation facility for the past 10 months. Lisa offered an update on Jake because she knew Star Wars fans might be thinking about the actor who played young Anakin Skywalker before the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace.
“Jake started having some trouble in high school,” Lisa explained, recalling the first time she noticed her son’s personality change. “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.”
Lisa recalled an instance when she asked a then-teen Jake to finish his homework, to which he replied, “I don’t even know if I need to do it. I don’t know which reality I’m in.”
She continued: “And I’m like, ‘Well, you’re in my reality today, so you have to do your homework.’”
Lisa subsequently took Jake to a doctor, who suggested he might have bipolar disorder. Jake was prescribed several medications, but none of them seemed to help. After Jake graduated from high school in 2007, he went on to attend Columbia College Chicago.
Jake’s issues, however, got worse once he was at college. “He missed a lot of classes,” Lisa noted. “And he was telling me that people were following him.”
Lisa said her son would tell her he saw people with “black eyes” staring at him. He would also have conversations late at night with The Daily Show host Jon Stewart through his television screen. Jake was ultimately diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
“When they finally told him, it totally threw him off into an even worse depression,” Lisa continued about her son’s declining mental health. “It was really hard.”
Jake chose not to take his medication because he didn’t think he needed it. That led to a run-in with the law in 2015 when Jake was involved in a multi-county chase with the police, which ended with him wrecking his car. Lisa tried to contact Jake to get him an attorney, but he wouldn’t return her calls.
The loss of Jake’s younger sister also seemed to contribute to his declining state. (Madison Lloyd died at age 26 in 2018 of natural causes.)
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Lisa noted that Jake currently has eight months left in his stay at a mental health rehabilitation facility following a psychotic break. In March 2023, Jake turned his car off in the middle of a three-lane road, which led to the authorities being called.
“He said he wanted to turn the car off. And he turned the car off in the middle of the three lanes, and we were in the middle lane,” Lisa recalled. “There was a lot of yelling and screaming. The police got there, and they asked Jake some questions. He was talking to them, but none of it made sense. It was all word salad.”
Jake was admitted to a hospital and was later transferred to an inpatient program at a mental health rehabilitation facility.
“He’s doing much better than I expected,” Lisa shared. “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.”
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Lisa also discussed Jake’s relationship with the Star Wars franchise after he left acting in the early 2000s.
“He loves all the new Star Wars stuff,” she added. “People think Jake hates Star Wars. He loves it.”
Lisa shut down speculation that the negative response to The Phantom Menace affected Jake’s mental health, adding, “It would have happened anyway. I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic.”
