Suffice it to say, Naomi Judd's death on April 30 came as a heartbreaking shock.
The 76-year-old singer and her daughter Wynonna Judd, who'd been performing together as The Judds for almost 40 years, were scheduled to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame the very next day. The mother-daughter duo planned to head out on a farewell tour in September.
Instead, Wynonna, 57, and her sister Ashley Judd, 54, had to figure out how to say goodbye.
"Today we sisters experienced a tragedy. We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness," the siblings said in a statement confirming Naomi's passing. "We are shattered. We are navigating profound grief and know that as we loved her, she was loved by her public. We are in unknown territory."
Naomi had discussed her personal struggles with mental health, including her three-year battle with suicidal depression after the end of The Judd's 2012 tour.
"I used say to myself, looking in the mirror, 'I'm Naomi freaking Judd. I got this,'" Naomi shared in an essay she penned for NBC News in 2017. "I even wrote it out and taped it there. But when the problem is your brain, when the problem involves the way that you're thinking and the way you're living every day of your life, you can't pull that off anymore."
After seeking treatment, Naomi became a spokesperson for National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in an effort to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health issues and wrote about her experiences in her 2016 memoir, River of Time: My Descent into Depression and How I Emerged with Hope.
In the past, the Grammy winner had also been open about her traumatic childhood, the devastating loss of her brother and her battle with hepatitis C that led to her early retirement.
Scroll on to read some of the most candid comments Naomi made about her own mental health and the struggles she faced throughout her life:
The death of her younger brother Brian Judd at age 17 from Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1965 tore her family apart, Naomi Judd told The Washington Post in 1994. Her parents later divorced and her father became an alcoholic.
"I didn't have much affection growing up," she said. "I lived in a very undemonstrative family and I know that's why I'm so demonstrative and emotional. I've always been this way, walking around like a big piñata, hoping somebody would break me open."
Brian's death inspired Naomi's early career as an ICU nurse in Kentucky before entering the music industry with her daughter Wynonna Judd in 1983.
During an her interview on Candy O'Terry's podcast Country Music Success Stories in 2020, Naomi talked about having her first daughter, Wynonnya, after being"date raped" by a football player when she was 18 years old.
"I got pregnant the first time I had sex," Naomi said. "Three months later, when I called him to tell him to say I thought I was pregnant, he said, 'Well, tough luck kiddo,' and he hung up the phone and we never heard from him."
Four years later, Naomi said, she was beaten and raped by an drug-addicted ex-boyfriend who broke into her home.
"He slapped me across the face," she shared. "He tortured me and he beat me real bad and then he raped me and then he took a shot of heroin, and when he took a second dose of heroin he passed out, so I took the girls and went to the sheriff station."
After winning five Grammys and releasing 20 top 10 hit songs in the 1980s with The Judds, Naomi announced her retirement in 1990. The singer revealed that she had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, which she contracted from an infected needle during her time working as a nurse.
"When I was told I had hepatitis C, I was on top of the world, selling out arenas," Naomi said at an event at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey in 2016, according to The Daily Record newspaper in Morris County, NJ. "Then I was told I had three stinkin' years to live."
In 1991, she founded the Naomi Judd Education and Research Fund to raise awareness of hepatitis C, and she also went on to become a spokesperson for the American Liver Foundation.
In a 2006 interview with AARP, Naomi explained she experienced symptoms from hepatitis C, including depression, panic attacks, and separation anxiety, especially as she watched her daughter embark on a solo career. "Wynonna had never been away from me a day in her life," Naomi said.
To combat the disease, Naomi underwent extensive interferon treatments, which can cause similar reactions to chemotherapy. She also experimented with "intregrated treatments," telling the magazine that she turned to biofeedback, aromatherapy and meditation.
"These personal ground zeros are what allow us to live," Naomi said of seeking these alternative options, which she credited with helping lower her stress and raise her self-awareness. "They strip us down, and you have no choice but to get rid of all this extraneous stuff."
By 1995, Naomi's disease was in full remission.
Naomi revealed in her 2016 book, River of Time: My Descent into Depression and How I Emerged with Hope, that she had suffered from suicidal depression.
"What I've been through is extreme," Naomi told Robin Roberts during an appearance on Good Morning America at the time. "My final diagnosis was severe depression."
"They see me in rhinestones, you know, with glitter in my hair, that really is who I am," she continued. "But then I would come home and not leave the house for three weeks, and not get out of my pajamas, and not practice normal hygiene. It was really bad."
After The Judds' Last Encore tour ended in 2012, Naomi's her depression took hold, the singer writing in her book that she began to plan how she might jump from a bridge near her Tennessee home.
"Nobody can understand it unless you've been there," she told People in 2016. "It's so beyond making sense but I thought, 'Surely my family will know that I was in so much pain and I thought they would have wanted me to end that pain [through suicide].'" She revealed what ultimately stopped her was the thought of a family member finding her body.
During her candid sit-down on GMA, Naomi explained she was initially "treatment resistant because they tried me on every single thing they had in their arsenal."
That included several stays in psychiatric wards and being prescribed a variety of medications, which Naomi said caused her face to swell up "like a balloon" and her hands to shake.
Ultimately, she said she was compelled to share her story because "it really felt like, if I live through this I want someone to be able to see that they can survive."
"I never dealt with all the stuff that happened to me, so it came out sideways, as depression and anxiety," Naomi wrote in a 2017 essay for NBC News, part of her partnership with National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital. "Depression is partly genetic, and I have it on both sides of my family."
She recalled her "devastated" husband Larry Strickland telling her, "I've got to get you some professional help, because I don't know what the heck to do." Her youngest daughter Ashley Judd also encouraged her to help.
"I had to go into serious treatment, and it was a long road—an incredibly painful road," Naomi explained. "There were times when I didn't think I was going to make it."
Noting that there were "almost 44 million people in America that experience mental illness in a given year," Naomi's goal was to reduce the stigma and let people know that "there's power in numbers: it means that there are other people. You're not alone."