Naomi Judd is revealing the crippling depression that had her ready to kill herself — but
The National ENQUIRER has the inside story on how her mental illness turned into a family tragedy! The country star revealed her harrowing mental breakdown in her memoir, “River of Time: My Descent Into Depression and How I Emerged With Hope.” But Naomi's superstar daughters
Wynonna and Ashley also endured their own crippling bouts of depression!
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Naomi doesn't pull any punches while revealing the depths of her own misery. “I wanted to be completely honest that if someone took out a gun and killed me on stage" she wrote about one concert, "they would be doing me a favor. But I didn’t. I was there to inspire them and I could not let them down.”
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Naomi, who turned 70 in 2016, revealed that The Judds' reunion tour of 2010 ultimately brought her to the brink of despair — and was so overwhelmed that she had to seek treatment in psychiatric hospitals. In addition to drowning in misery, Naomi says she also suffered from fearsome panic attacks, PTSD, toxic drug poisoning and addiction. But the future superstar first thought about ending it all when she was a single gal pregnant with Wynonna!
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She planned suicide twice while with her first child, Naomi confessed, but changed her mind both times. “At least suicide would make everyone feel sorry for me,” Naomi said later. Despite the popularity of The Judds and the millions of records they’ve sold, Naomi would go on to a hard life full of of ups and downs. Naomi would end up raising both Winona and Ashley as a single parent, gracing her children with talent but burdening them with their own dark secrets!
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Their chaotic upbringing chaos drove singer Wynonna to
pack on the pounds and take to her bed, while actress Ashley was left with emotional scars that required serious therapy. "It wasn't until Wynonna and Ashley became adults that the demons of their youth came back to haunt them," said a Judd family friend. "They sometimes blamed their mom for the mistakes she made, and they were gripped by depression when they finally dealt with their anger and resentment."
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Desperately driven to make a name for herself and Wynonna in the country music world, Naomi dragged her daughters from state to state in the back seat of a beat-up old station wagon. They were dogged by poverty after Naomi's divorce from Mike Ciminella — Ashley's father, and the man Wynonna was falsely led to believe was her dad!
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Years later, Wynonna learned her mother had been living a lie. By then, Wynonna had already survived an earlier depression brought on when Naomi was diagnosed with the potentially fatal disease hepatitis C and retired — leaving Wynonna to make it on her own in the cutthroat music business.
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Her spirits sank again when Naomi's lie was exposed. "When I turned 30, I found out the true identity of my father, and it devastated me," said Wynonna. "I never got to meet him." Naomi knew that Wynonna's real father was former high-school sweetheart Charles Jordan, but decided to pin her out-of-wedlock pregnancy on the man that she married.
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"Mike Ciminella told me that one day when Wynonna was a toddler, he looked at her while she was playing on the floor and he just knew she wasn't his," said the family friend. Naomi even continued the lie in an earlier autobiography titled "Love Can Build A Bridge."
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And while Naomi and Wynonna found fame, Ashley struggled as a hostess in a Los Angeles restaurant. After finding success in hit movies like "Kiss The Girls," she still felt lonely and left out. "She cried for hours at a time and felt antisocial and overly sensitive," confided a showbiz insider. "When weeks turned into months, she realized she was
suffering from depression. This forced her to confront issues from her dysfunctional childhood."
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Ashley finally mustered up the courage to confront Naomi and Wynonna and reveal her bottled-up anger. "You walk to the edge and you stand there and look down into the abyss and things come out of you," she said, crediting her old boyfriend pop singer Michael Bolton with giving her the strength to face her problems.
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"Michael was loving me in such a way that I felt safe enough to express my depression," she says. "I felt so deeply loved that whatever I was and whatever I needed to feel was OK." Naomi is currently admitting that she and Wynonna are once again estranged, but also says that she expects the two will reconnect.
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The singer-turned-author is also hoping to connect with a new audience. “Naomi wants her readers to know that there’s hope for people struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide,” said a source. “Her message is: ‘You can come out of this. I did!’”
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