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Throughout her career, Collins has been socially active. She is a representative for UNICEF and an advocate for the destruction of landmines and suicide prevention. She always has been more than a singer.
Yeah, she was a trooper.
From wikipedia:
Collins contracted polio at the age of eleven and spent two months in isolation in a hospital.
In 1962, shortly after her debut at Carnegie Hall, Collins was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent six months recuperating in a sanatorium.
Collins is the subject of the Stephen Stills composition "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", which appeared on the 1969 eponymous debut album of Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Collins later admitted having suffered from bulimia after she quit smoking in the 1970s. "I went straight from the cigarettes into an eating disorder", she told People magazine in 1992. "I started throwing up. I didn't know anything about bulimia, certainly not that it is an addiction or that it would get worse. My feelings about myself, even though I had been able to give up smoking and lose 20 lbs., were of increasing despair." She has written at length of her years of addiction to alcohol, the damage it did to her personal and musical life and how it contributed to her feelings of depression. Collins admits that although she tried other drugs in the 1960s, alcohol had always been her drug of first choice, just as it had been for her father. She entered a rehabilitation program in Pennsylvania in 1978 and has maintained her sobriety ever since, even through such traumatic events as the death of her only child, Clark, who died by suicide in 1992 at age 33 after a long bout with clinical depression and substance abuse. Since his death, she has also become an activist for suicide prevention.