Drew Barrymore claims that spending 18 months in a mental hospital as a troublesome teenager was eventually beneficial to her.

The Never Been Kissed actress had a rough childhood and was hooked to drugs and alcohol by the time she was in her teens. Her relationship with her parents was difficult, and at the age of 13, her mother Jaid had committed her to a mental institution. Thankfully, Barrymore was able to rebuild her life, but she feels it would not have been possible without the 18 months she spent isolated from the rest of the world.

During an interview for her book “Wildflower,” Drew Barrymore disclosed insights about her childhood.

“They (Barrymore’s parents) were pretty out there! But I realised, honestly, yeah, my mom locked me up in an institution. Boo hoo! But it did give an amazing discipline,” Barrymore told The Guardian.

“It was like serious recruitment training and boot camp, and it was horrible and dark and very long-lived, a year and a half, but I needed it. I needed that whole insane discipline. My life was not normal. I was not a kid in school with normal circumstances. There was something very abnormal, and I needed some severe shift.”

Barrymore, 40, had no notice that she was being transported to the institution and only saw her mother on rare occasions throughout her sentence. She said that if she had known, she would have fled her home.

While the actress never considered herself to be mentally sick, she did acknowledge that she was “off course” and needed to get her life back on track.

Barrymore called her time at the center a “very important thing for me to experience.”

She said, “It was a very important thing to experience for me. It was very humbling, very quieting. Maybe it was necessary, because I came out of there a more respecting person. And my parents didn’t teach me that, and life wasn’t teaching me that. I came out in a very different way… but I still was me.”

After her release, Barrymore was encouraged to formally split from her parents, and at the age of 14, she moved into her own Hollywood apartment.

Barrymore, who is now a mother of two and happily married to her third husband, May Kopelman, recognizes that her daughters will one day ask her about her upbringing, and she is prepared to answer them.

“I’ve been caught off guard when people go, ‘What are you going to do when your kids Google you?’ and I’m like, ‘God, that is so accusatory.'” She confessed. “I’m not going to pretend I am not who I am. I’m going to show them how it got me to where I am now.”

Barrymore spoke with The Guardian after revealing that she struggled with post-partum depression for six months after the birth of her second child. She told Celebrity Babies, however, that she is grateful for the experience since it taught her how to separate her business and personal lives and to tackle things one at a time.