The daughter of New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has shared her story of battling clinical depression and past substance abuse in a new video. Chiara de Blasio, 19, says she fought depression during her entire adolescence and used drugs and alcohol to make it easier. 

"I just kept reasoning and like using this really fake rationale that was so justified to me that I could keep doing this stuff," she said. "Like, oh, I won't drink, I'll just smoke weed...I'm not going to smoke weed, I'll just drink. It's just bartering for equally bad outcomes," she continued.
She thought that all of her problems would go away when she went away to college. "I just really didn't understand what I had to be doing to be a successful student," she explained. She was able to reach sobriety after her therapist referred her to what she described as "institutional group therapy," where she was able to be open about her problems with people close to her in age. 

Towards the end of the video, de Blasio calls for anyone facing obstacles of drugs and depression to ask for help. "I wanted to speak out because people are suffering from this disease and dying from this disease everyday and we really can't do anything as a society to help those people, until we start talking about it."
The mayor-elect said on Tuesday that he was proud of his daughter for displaying courage in speaking up about her experiences, according to the New York Times.

“If you look at this video, it speaks to a whole set of challenges that we face in our society,” the mayor-elect said. “She speaks to it with incredible courage and clarity and, you know, with a voice that really suggests an incredible wisdom for someone who’s only 19 years old.”
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(Photo: Chiara de Blasio via YouTube)