The mother of Anakin Skywalker actor Jake Lloyd has provided a health update on her son following his “heart-breaking” psychotic breakdown.
Jake Lloyd, now 35, was universally recognisable as the cheerful kid who played Anakin Skywalker in Phantom of the Menace, episode one of George Lucas’ rebooted Star Wars franchise. May this year will mark 25 years since the film lit up cinema screens, launching a 10-year-old Jake into the Hollywood spotlight in the process.
But now Jake’s mum, Lisa Lloyd, has provided a chilling update on Jake, whose life turned into a nightmare after Phantom of the Menace came out. According to Lisa, Jake started having trouble with his mental health while attending high school
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(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
“He missed a lot of classes, and he was telling me that people were following him,” said Lisa, speaking to Scripps News. “[While at high school] he started talking about ‘realities.’ He didn’t know if he was in this reality, or a different reality.”
Things spiralled while Jake was enrolled at a different school when he would sometimes mention seeing people with “black eyes” staring at him on the street, and would have late-night conversations with Daily Show host Jon Stewart through the TV.
“He didn’t tell us he was hearing voices at the time. But he was,” said Lisa.
(Image: Lucasfilm/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)
In 2008, psychiatrists diagnosed Jake with paranoid schizophrenia, but this “threw him off into an even worse depression” according to Lisa.
“He didn’t think he needed to take medication because he wasn’t sick,” she said. “He didn’t think he needed to go to the therapist because there’s nothing wrong with him.”
Jake turned to illicit drugs in order to cope with his depression, which led to a run-in with Florida police in 2015, who arrested him for “reckless driving” after a high-speed car chase.
After 10 months in the slammer where he experienced regular violent “hallucinations”, Jake looked to be recovering until his younger sister Madison died unexpectedly in her sleep, aged just 26.
(Image: Lucasfilm/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)
“He just couldn’t handle it. He didn’t know how to process it,” Lisa said. This led to a “full-blown” psychotic episode in 2023, when Jake “turned the car off in the middle of three lanes, yelling and screaming” when on the way back from MacDonald’s with his mum.
“The police got there, and they asked Jake some questions,” Lisa said. “He was talking to them, but none of it made sense. It was all word salad.” Jake was taken to hospital, from where he was admitted to an inpatient programme at a mental health rehabilitation facility.
“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.”
Lisa hopes the stay at mental rehabilitation centre will be a turning point – Jake is currently about 10 months into an 18-month stay.
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
