Drew Barrymore has said, in several interviews over the years, that she felt from an early age as if the parental roles in her household were reversed — that she was the one managing Jaid’s emotional needs rather than the other way around. “I was the parent to them,” she said in one interview. “It was all totally upside-down.” This inversion — a child taking on adult emotional labor in a household that provides insufficient adult stability — is recognized in developmental psychology as a pattern with significant long-term consequences. It tends to produce children who are precociously competent in some dimensions and profoundly unprepared in others.
Drew Barrymore, by the time she was thirteen, had entered the psychiatric care system.
She was placed in Van Nuys Behavioral Health Hospital, a psychiatric facility in the San Fernando Valley. She would remain there for eighteen months. She has described this period in various ways at various points in her life — with anger, with a kind of rueful acknowledgment, with the complexity of someone who is trying to understand a formative experience that contained multiple things simultaneously.
At some point during this period — her own accounts, and secondary sources, place this at thirteen or fourteen, with some variation in the details — she attempted suicide. She has spoken about this publicly, though with appropriate restraint about specifics, as a moment in which she genuinely expected her life to end before she reached adulthood. The expectation that she would not survive to twenty-five, she has said, was not a dramatic statement but an actual assessment of her trajectory.