Country Music Star Naomi Judd’s Cause of Death Revealed as Suicide

Grammy-winning country music star Naomi Judd — known for being part of the mother-daughter duo The Judds — died by suicide at age 76.

While the singer’s death was announced on Saturday, the cause of death was not immediately made clear. On Monday, a report by PEOPLE revealed that Judd had died by suicide “after struggling with mental illness for much of her life.”

Judd’s daughters Ashley and Wynonna announced the country star’s death over the weekend in a statement posted to social media.

“Today we sisters experienced a tragedy. We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness,” they said. “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.”

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Judd had been a longtime advocate for mental health and wrote an open letter for Mental Health Awareness Week in 2018.

“To understand this issue better, we have to bring the study of suicide into mainstream neuroscience and treat the condition like every other brain disorder,” Judd wrote.

“People who commit suicide are experiencing problems with mood, impulse control, and aggression, all of which involve discrete circuits in the brain that regulate these aspects of human experience, but we still don’t understand how these circuits go haywire in the brains of suicide victims,” the singer added.

The country star had also reportedly opened up about her struggles with suicidal depression in her 2016 book, River of Time: My Descent into Depression and How I Emerged With Hope.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.