‘Star Wars’ Child Star Jake Lloyd Has Been Hospitalized For 10 Months After Suffering Psychotic Break

Jake Lloyd, who played a young Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, has been living in a mental health facility ever since he suffered a psychotic break in March 2023.

Jake, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia after dropping out of college in 2008, was driving home from McDonald’s when he had a breakdown, his mother Lisa Lloyd said in an interview with Scripps News.

“He said he wanted to turn the car off,” she recalled of the incident involving her now 35-year-old son. “And he turned the car off in the middle of the three lanes, and we were in the middle lane. There was a lot of yelling and screaming.”

Other drivers on the road ended up calling 911. When police arrived at the scene and questioned Jake, Lisa said he was “talking to them, but none of it made sense,” describing her son’s sentences as “word salad.”

Jake was ultimately taken to a hospital instead of jail, before he was eventually transferred to an inpatient program at a mental health facility. He is currently 10 months into his 18-month stay and according to his mother, he’s doing very well.

“He’s doing much better than I expected,” Lisa said. “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.”

It has been a long road for Lisa and her family. She said she began noticing that something was off with Jake when he was in high school.

“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,” she said, adding that when she asked him if he finished his homework, he replied, “Well, I don’t even know if I need to do it. I don’t know which reality I’m in.”

His symptoms only worsened when he went away to college, often telling his mother that he was being followed and that he would see people with “black eyes” staring at him on the street. “He didn’t tell us he was hearing voices at the time. But he was,” she recalled.

According to Lisa, her son was thrust into an “even worse depression” when he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Because he “wasn’t sick,” he refused to take medication or seek help via therapy. However, it all came to a head when he was sentenced to 10 months behind bars after leading police on a car chase through multiple counties before crashing his vehicle in 2015.

“As a mom, you’re just pulling your hair out because your child needs help,” Lisa said. “You know that he’s sick. You know that he’s not going to get any better unless he gets some medication.”

With Jake doing better these days, Lisa also shut down rumors that he quit acting due to the negative reviews for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, noting that she “protected him from the backlash” and revealing that he “loves” the new Star Wars shows like Ahsoka.

“People say he quit because of Star Wars. Well, that’s not true. It didn’t have anything to do with Star Wars. It had more to do with our family. And we were going through a divorce,” she explained. “Things were unsettled and kind of rough. And Jake didn’t seem to be having a lot of fun auditioning anymore.”

The 25th anniversary of the movie is approaching, and Lisa is hopeful that her son will get to celebrate the franchise at some point in the future.

“I would love for him to get well enough to be able to do a little bit of something, and I’m sure he would maybe like to do that,” she said. “He couldn’t at this point, but you never know how much he’s going to improve. So we’ll see.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health, call or text the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) hotline at 800-950-NAMI (6264).