Jake Lloyd’s Mother Shares Her Son’s Mental Health Struggle Following ‘Star Wars’
With The Phantom Menace celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, it also marks Jake Lloyd’s 35th birthday (the boy who played Anakin Skywalker). In an interview with Scripps News, Lloyd’s mother, Lisa, shares her son’s story and how the actor has battled against mental illness for many years. She also explains how her son Jake never experienced the backlash following his performance in The Phantom Menace.
Lisa Lloyd noted that her son, Jake, started developing issues in High School. At first, Jake was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Jake started taking medications but his mother says that nothing worked. Then in 2008, after dropping out of college, Jake was diagnosed with schizophrenia:
“Jake started having some trouble 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. …
He didn’t tell us he was hearing voices at the time. But he was.”
When Jake received the diagnosis, his mother Lisa said that it threw him further into depression. It didn’t help that Jake also has a neurological condition called anosognosia, which causes a patient to not be aware of or unconsciously deny their symptoms. This led to him not taking medications or going to treatment, thinking nothing was wrong. It also led to self-medication through the use of illicit drugs.
In 2015, his mother tells of how Jake was under arrest after leading police on a car chase before crashing. At the time, Jake was not taking his medication. While Jake spent 10 months in prison, Lisa fought to get him admitted to a hospital instead, but she was told there weren’t any available beds:
“I was talking to the people at the jail and trying to explain to them that he’s off his medication. But they wouldn’t give him his medication. …
As a mom, you’re just pulling your hair out because your child needs help. You know that he’s sick. You know that he’s not going to get any better unless he gets some medication.”
After being released from prison, Jake moved to California where he lived with his mother. Even then, his struggles continued, including one episode where he called his mother saying he had been shot inside his apartment. But in actuality, Jake was suffering from another hallucination.
It didn’t help that, in 2018, his sister Madison died at the age of 26. Lisa explains that Jake’s younger sister, Madison was a source of encouragement. Then in 2023, Jake suffered a psychotic breakdown while driving on the freeway. He then was admitted to a hospital and received help at a mental health rehabilitation facility:
“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. 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.”
He is currently 10 months into an 18-month stay at a rehabilitation center. For those who think Jake’s mental health issues were a result of the negative backlash following The Phantom Menace, his mother Lisa doesn’t think so. She says that she protected him against the negative discourse and that it would’ve happened anyway due to his father’s side of the family also having a history of schizophrenia:
“It would have happened anyway. I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic. …
I protected him from the backlash. He was just riding his bike outside, playing with his friends. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. Everybody makes such a big deal about that. And it’s rather annoying to me because Jake was a little kid when that came out, and he didn’t really feel all that stuff because I didn’t let him online.”
In fact, Jake is still a big fan of Star Wars. His mother gave him an action figure of Ahsoka Tano for his birthday and he still likes wearing Star Wars shirts in public:
“He loves all the new Star Wars stuff. People think Jake hates Star Wars. He loves it. …
Jake loved filming Star Wars. He had so much fun. 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. He couldn’t at this point, but you never know how much he’s going to improve. So we’ll see.”
Lisa ends on a positive note, saying that his son is “doing much better than I expected.” She also states that Jake is “becoming a little bit more social,” and is “more enthusiastic about hanging out with family friends at barbecues and celebrating holidays.”
Born and raised in Hawaii, Jay Goodearl runs the YouTube Gaming channel “Good Games, Dude” His channel aims to open up video games to beginners and immediate players and help them understand what makes games the art form that it is.
