Drew Barrymore talks about what it was like to be 13 and spend more than a year in a psychiatric ward

Drew Barrymore’s past as a Hollywood wild child is widely known, but the actor who was raised in a famous family and achieved stardom at a young age (Barrymore was just seven when she starred in E.T.) is once again talking about how it wasn’t as fun or glamorous as it looked. Barrymore has been open about her struggle with addiction issues before, admitting to using both drugs and alcohol at the parties and clubs her mother would take her to when she was still a pre-teen. Following a suicide attempt at 13, her mother had her hospitalized, an experience Drew recalls as being committed to a “full psychiatric ward” for a year and a half.

“My mom put me in a place that was like a full psychiatric ward,” said Barrymore during an interview with Howard Stern. “I used to laugh at those Malibu 30 day places… a little spa vacation for 30 days in Malibu was the opposite of the experience I had.”

"I was in a place for a year and a half called Van Nuys Psychiatric,” she continued, “and you couldn't mess around in there. If you did, you'd get thrown either in the padded room or get put in stretcher restraints and tied up.” Barrymore told Stern that the hospital population consisted of teens like herself as well as elderly patients, which added to the strangeness of her time there.

Barrymore was emancipated from her parents when she was just 14. Now 46 and a mother to two girls who she parents very differently from the way she was raised, she told Stern that as an adult she realizes why her mother resorted to such an extreme solution. "I was going to clubs and not going to school and stealing my mom's car and, you know, I was out of control," she said. "So, you know, sometimes it was as humorous as that and sometimes I was just so angry that I would go off and then I'd get thrown in 'the thing.'" (The "thing” being Van Nuys Behavioral Health Hospital.)

As part of her road to recovery, Barrymore said that she stopped speaking to her mother, calling the decision "the worst pain I've ever known."

"I think she created a monster and she didn't know what to do with the monster," she added, about her mother's decision to institutionalize her.  "This was her last gasp, and I really was out of control, and I forgive her for making this choice. She probably felt she had nowhere to turn."

Over the years, Drew and her mother Jaid, who also lived through a difficult childhood, have reconnected. “I know the changes that I’ve made and how long they took,” said Barrymore. “I know that’s possible for people, so why not her, too?”

BEFORE YOU GO: Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Garner had a '13 Going on 30' reunion