Billy Joel’s daughter opens up about family depression

Alexa Ray Joel, daughter of Billy Joel is set to be the celebrity grand marshal at the Race of Hope to Defeat Depression taking place on August 3.

About the illness and its connection to her life and family, she remarked, "Depression runs in my family. I've seen my father struggle with it. I've seen my grandmother struggle, and personally, I've experienced it as well.”

"I've always struggled with it. I sort of describe depression as feeling like you have this non-existential sort of weight," she added. "It's not literal, you can't see it, right? You can't grasp it. But it's just this weight in the back of your mind, where things just feel heavy. For me, I don't know that I would say that I have chronic depression. It kind of comes and goes."

About her grandmother, the musician revealed, "And his mother. My wonderful, I miss her so much, my grandmother, Nanny, struggled with bipolar disorder. It was undiagnosed, because this was back in the '50s, when mental health wasn't fully understood... There was a very negative stigma around it. But it was discovered in the later years that it was bipolar disorder."

"He had to go through so much, and so much struggle. But there's also a lot of beauty that came out of that, with all of these incredible songs. And I think it makes him so much more relatable as a man, who has had these struggles, and has been so transparent about it,” she added about her father’s journey. 

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