Chiara de Blasio, the 19-year-old daughter of New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, discussed her past struggles with depression and drug and alcohol abuse in a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday.
In the nearly five-minute video, de Blasio explains that she suffered from clinical depression throughout her adolescence and turned to alcohol and marijuana during her time as a student at Santa Clara University.
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"It made it easier, the more I drank and did drugs, to share some common ground with people that I wouldn't have," de Blasio says in the video. "It didn't start out as a huge thing for me, but then it became a really huge thing for me."
She goes on to discuss how she was able to overcome her problems with abuse, depression and anxiety through group therapy sessions at an outpatient treatment center in New York City.
"Removing substances from my life has opened so many doors for me ," de Blasio says. "I was able to participate in my dad's campaign, and that was, like, the greatest thing ever."
Bill de Blasio won the New York mayoral election by a landslide last month, securing 73% of the vote and beating Republican challenger Joe Lhota. Although he ran a campaign heavily emphasized his family, de Blasio was extremely careful with information about his daughter.
One of his campaign managers even lashed out at a New York Times reporter for tweeting innocuous information regarding his daughter's college — something de Blasio himself tweeted about last year.
I thought the @nytimes had some class. @katetaylornyt, it was know by many but some reporters have discretion.
— Bill Hyers (@HyersBill) October 29, 2013
Standing alongside his family outside their house Tuesday afternoon, de Blasio discussed his daughter's video and praised her "incredible wisdom for someone who's only 19-years-old."
"We are incredibly proud of Chiara," he said. "If you look at this video, it speaks to a whole set of challenges we face in our society, that families face all the time."
On Twitter, the video was largely met with sympathy and praise for de Blasio's brave move in coming forward about mental illness, a topic that is often buried, especially in politics. Others, however, pegged the video as a calculated political move.
The mayor-elect also tweeted about his daughter's video earlier on Tuesday:
We are extremely proud of Chiara’s strength and courage. We love and support her unconditionally https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJKmjx1JjwI&feature=youtu.be
— Bill de Blasio (@BilldeBlasio) December 24, 2013
In the latter of the video, she talks about her desire to help people who suffer from problems similar, citing statistics from the U.S. National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism interspersed on the screen. Approximately 1.3 million Americans need treatment for a substance abuse problem.
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