She was gone for little more than a day, tracked by police to a budget hotel in a Chicago suburb and hospitalised after disappearing early on Sunday morning amid reports that she was ­“missing, suicidal”.

The private life of the Irish musician Sinéad ­O’Connor is as complicated as her career has been controversial. But the increasingly harrowing events of the past few months suggest that, at the age of 49, she is in the throes of deep emotional pain.

In November, she posted a heartbreaking plea for help, hinting at strife within her large family – she has had four children with four different men.

“I don’t matter a shred to any­one,” she wrote. “I’ve died a million times already with the pain of it … Please love me … come to the hospital and spend time with me.”

By December, she seemed to be on the mend, “happy here in hospital receiving the tender care of educated professionals”. But in the past few days, ­O’Connor’s demons seem to have returned, exposing a family crisis centred on the fact that her 12-year-old son Shane appears to have been taken into care in Ireland.

On Monday, while in hospital, O’Connor posted a shockingly vitriolic open letter on Facebook, addressed to John Reynolds, her first husband and frequent songwriting collaborator and record producer. She accused him and Jake, the son they had in 1987, of abandoning her.

She went on to beg Jake, now 29 and a father himself, to take custody of Shane and “make sure he gets therapy and medication”. She will, she adds ominously, “never return to … any of my four children”.

Contrast her desperate emotional state with the uplifting lyrics on one of the autobiographical songs on her 2014 album, I'm Not Bossy, I'm The Boss. In the haunting 8 Good ­Reasons, co-written with ­Reynolds, ­O'Connor sings frankly of her weariness with life. But, she adds: "I got eight good reasons to stick around." Those eight reasons? The eyes of her four ­children.

Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor was born on December 8, 1966, in Glenageary, a suburb in County Dublin, Ireland. Named after the wife of Éamon de Valera, the Irish president who fought the British in 1916, and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, she was born into a life of revolution and spirituality.

The third of five children born to Sean O’Connor, an engineer, and his wife Marie, O’Connor’s childhood was disrupted at the age of 8 when her parents parted acrimoniously.

Shuttled between them, by 15, O’Connor had gone off the rails. After being caught shoplifting, she spent 18 months in a home for wayward girls. In 2010, she blamed her mother, “an abusive, less-than-perfect parent”, who died in a car crash in 1985.

But there had been an upside to being institutionalised. One of the nuns glimpsed ­O'Connor's potential and gave the teenager her first guitar. After a brief period at a school in Waterford, O'Connor dropped out and headed for London, a transition she recalled in ­Daddy I'm Fine, an uplifting auto­biographical track on her 2000 album Faith and Courage: "I've got myself a big fat plan/ I'm gonna be a singer in a rock 'n' roll band/ I'm going to change everything I can."

And she did. Signed by Ensign Records at the age of 17, several collaborations followed before O'Connor, now 20 and pregnant with Jake, recorded and released her first album in 1987. The Lion and the Cobra was a commercial success, hailed by one critic as "one of the most electrifying debuts in rock history".

On the cover, O’Connor wore her trademark cropped hair. It wasn’t a fashion statement, she explained in 2014. The record company had “wanted me to grow my hair really long and wear miniskirts … because they reckoned I’d look much prettier”, she said. “So I went straight around to the barber.”

Her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, followed in 1990 to widespread acclaim. Among its hits was the Prince-penned song ­Nothing Compares 2 U, which along with the close-up video of her young, tear-streaked face, did more than anything to make her ­famous.

For her, it was not a song about a lost lover, but a requiem for her dead mother. “All the ­flowers that you planted, mama, in the back yard/ All died when you went away,” she sang.

Her songs “were always my life story, always like diaries”, she said in an interview in 2009. “I had grown up in a pretty severe situation, and I was using music as a way of healing myself.”

Creatively exhausted, perhaps, by her confessional start, ­O'Connor trod water with her third album, Am I Not Your Girl?, taking refuge in a collection of jazz standards. Another album and an EP followed before a "best of" compilation.

In 2000, O'Connor exploded back into life with the powerful Faith and Courage, her first studio album in six years, and perhaps her finest work. A series of eclectic, occasionally self-­indulgent albums followed, but in 2014, she flew high once again with her 10th full-length album.

Dressed in a black latex dress and wearing a black wig, she was almost unrecognisable on the cover. One interviewer asked her if she was trying to disguise herself. She replied: “Well, maybe the other [me] has been the ­disguise.

“I knew nobody had ever seen me looking like a female,” she said, “and that if I put out a couple of shots of me in a dress with hair everyone would run them – and then they’d have to talk about the album.”

It was originally called The Vishnu Room, but at the last minute, O'Connor changed the title to I'm Not Bossy, I'm The Boss, in homage to the Ban Bossy campaign, launched that year to encourage girls to "flex their leadership muscles".

O’Connor, as one interviewer noted in 2014, “has never been timid about speaking her mind, in song or in person”, or taking the lead on difficult subjects. In the media, nonconformist O’Connor’s passionate outrage has frequently been misrepresented as a brand of crazy, when all she has done is express her views, often powerfully, on subjects that are important to her.

She has argued intelligently and persuasively, tackling tough subjects such as child abuse in the Roman Catholic church, and raising her voice – and cancelling concerts in Israel – in support of causes such as the plight of the Palestinians.

In 1991, she pulled out of the ­Grammys, the American music industry's backslapping fest, despite being nominated for four awards and winning Best Alternative Music Performance for I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. The awards, she explained, honoured "people who have achieved material success rather than those who have told the truth or done anything to ­inspire".

In 1992, she appeared on NBC's Saturday Night Live and sang an a cappella version of the Bob ­Marley song War. She turned it into a protest against child abuse in the Catholic church, tearing up a picture of the Pope, shouting: "Fight the real enemy." A shocked silence greeted her as she walked offstage.

Highly spiritual, her relationship with religion has always been ambiguous. In 1999, she shocked many in conservative Ireland by being ordained as a priest in a breakaway faction of the Catholic church.

In recent years, O’Connor’s faith and courage has given way increasingly to fragility and fear. In 2012, she told her followers on Twitter that she was “really unwell … and in danger” and asked them to recommend “a ­psychiatrist in Dublin or ­Wicklow who could urgently see me today”.

But in an appearance weeks later on a BBC TV chat show, she delivered a blistering performance of the joyful song The Wolf Is Getting Married, a title inspired by an Arabic expression for the moment the sun breaks through the clouds.

“How are you?” inquired the host. “I’ve dealt with this [question] for 25 years,” she sighed. “Everyone treats me like a crazy person, and it’s a great source of amusement and ­entertainment.”

Certainly, "crazy" was the brickbat that came her way the following year, after she wrote an open letter to the young singer Miley Cyrus. In a "spirit of motherliness and with love", she criticised the explicit video for Cyrus's hit Wrecking Ball, telling her she would "obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped".

It was a formidable debunking of the modern myth that provocative acts equal female empowerment, from the singer who 13 years earlier had delivered the powerful feminist marching song No Man's Woman.

On March 4, O'Connor gave a chilling performance of Life on Mars at a David Bowie tribute concert in Chicago. Whatever has happened in the intervening two months, that night she was in her element, and all seemed well. But it remains to be seen whether O'Connor's wolf will be smiling again any time soon.

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