Kitty Dukakis, a first lady and humanitarian activist, who overcame alcoholism and depression with the help of electric shock treatment, then became a supporter of treatment with her husband, Michael S. Dukakis, the former Massachite Governor, and the former Massachite Governor, Mass.
Her son, John, told the media that the cause was complications of dementia.
Mrs Dukakis was a long -term activist on behalf of the underdogs and the people who fought. Among the topics that are most important to her was the continuation of Holocaust training. He was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 to the Committee of the First Holocaust Chairman, which attempted to create a national monument and museum. When this group was replaced a decade later by the United States Holocaust Council, it was appointed to the Council by President George HW Bush.
“Perhaps in the whole history of culture, the Holocaust was the most important lesson in the inhumane power of man,” he told the National Association of Governors in 1983.
Few political spouses were as accurate as Mrs Dukakis to share the familiar details of their struggles with addiction and depression. She wrote two books that revealed in painful detail her timely dependence on eating pills, how alcoholism later took her life and how she returned, at the age of 64, to cure electric shocks to deal with the unstable depression she had said.
The successful treatment of Electrosck has also led her husband to publicly support the efficiency of the process and even keep support teams in their home.
But for most of her time in the spotlight, she carefully concealed her consumption and depression.
She worked as a modern dance teacher and sank in many reasons as her husband followed his political career. With the passion of helping the underdog, she dedicated herself to works related to the homeless, the refugees, the AIDS and the Holocaust.
“As a Jew,” he once said, “I feel that I have a real responsibility to help others who are suffering.”
He worked with the Lutheran Union to remove children from refugee camps and in the United States. At one point in the early 1980s, she went to a refugee camp at the Thai-Campodia border to seek an orphan missing from her sister, near Boston. When a Thai colonel will not leave her in the camp, she fell on her knees and begged. fell. Found the boy and He reunited him with his sister. He later won a full scholarship at Brandeis University.
Mr Dukakis said his wife was always empathy to the powerless.
“Kitty’s dad said that when she was 5 or 6, he would bring the most Bedraggled, hitting a kid in her classroom at home and comforted him,” Dukakis recalls in an interview in 2016. “He was born a social worker.”
She and her husband cut strikingly different figures. He was the cool, calm technocratic, simple and measured, who bought in the costco, took the trash while walking to work and released all the places for Thanksgiving carcasses that would otherwise be rejected so that he could make soup for the next year. On the other hand, she was expressive, impulsive and expensive, partial for shopping at Whole Foods, flying first grade and using her influence to get what she wanted.
Their attraction, as opposed, became part of the 1988 Presidential Campaign narrative, when he was the Democratic candidate. Her initial perception as a high, demanding husband, not to mention a responsibility, evolved into one of them as a close associate who humanized her husband. The campaign’s assistants were not unhappy that Mr Dukakis forgot he was wearing a live wire when, after several days away, he reconnected with his wife going to the parade of St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago and the whole country listened to him, “I hear him.
Perhaps the most lasting public moment for Mrs Dukakis during the campaign was a discussion question she raised about her. The CNN Bernard Shaw Coordinator, Bernard Shaw, had asked Mr Dukakis: “The ruler, if Kitty Dukakis was in a hurry and murdered, would you prefer an irrevocable death penalty for the assassin?”
“No, I don’t, Bernard,” Dukakis replied without emotion before confirming his opposition to the death penalty and discussing his crime record. Analysts called The Tone Tone Tone, one of the worst in the history of the presidential debate, and said it helped to sink Mr Dukakis’ chances against his opponent, Vice President George HW Bush, who won 40 states and the presidency.
Kitty Dukakis was embarrassed, later told reporters. He was also alive and called the question outrageous and inappropriate.
“Fortunately God is not the candidate,” he said strongly, “because I don’t know what I would do.”
Katharine Dickson was born on December 26, 1936 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and grew up in nearby Brookline. She loves her father, Harry Ellis Dickson, who was the first violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a Boston Pops pipeline.
She had a more inflated relationship with her mother, Jane (Goldberg) Dickson, which Mrs Dukakis described as an accurate perfectionist whose standards were almost impossible to meet. In her first book, “Now You Know”, published in 1990, Mrs Dukakis recalled that her mother had said she was beautiful, but that Jinny’s younger sister had a personality. This and many similar comments, Mrs Dukakis said, fueled the low self -esteem that plagues her all her life.
He watched Penn State, but abandoned in 1957 to marry John Chaffetz, with whom he had a son, John. She and Mr. Chaffetz split a few years later. She received her ba from Lesley College in 1963, in the same year she married Mr. Dukakis. In 1982 she received her MA from the University of Boston.
Dukakises had two daughters, Andrea and Kara, who, along with John, survive Mrs. Dukakis, her survivors also include her husband And grandchildren and grandchildren. Her sister, Janet Peters, died in 2021.
While Mr Dukakis served as a ruler, from 1975 to 1979 from 1983 to 1991, Mrs Dukakis kept an office in Statehouse for her efforts.
She kept her diet pills a secret from her husband, who discovered her commission at one point and told her to stop taking them. He did it for about three months. But she took day -to -day amphetamines from 1956 until she controlled herself at the Hazelden Rehabilitation Center in Minnesota in 1982.
She publicly revealed her addiction to the pill in 1987, while her husband secured the democratic presidential candidacy. What he didn’t say was that alcohol replaced the pills slowly.
But, as she later wrote, she drank during the campaign, going to Benders sometimes forced to cancel the appearances. Two days after her husband’s defeat, she began to fall, often until she passed out, sometimes in her own vomit.
He was not upset to lose the election, he said, though he was afraid he would get out of control if the First Lady and the crisis became. On the contrary, the sudden end of the campaign consuming the campaign had left the sense of empty, without purpose.
In February 1989, just three months after the election, she admitted her alcoholism publicly and checked at a treatment center at Newport, Ri
“I am afraid that deep down I am nothing, that I am not good and that you will see it and reject me,” he told the media when he left the center. Any soberness was short -lived. Until November, a year after the election, he was hospitalized after drinking alcohol. Her family had got rid of the house of all drinks, letting her drink whatever she could find, including the hair spray.
She and her husband believed that her consumption was led by a deep depression, but antidepressants and speech therapy did not help. It’s been almost two decades searching for treatment while entering and out of Rehab.
Finally, they have learned about electric shock or ECT, a process that can eliminate a person’s memory, but can also be extremely effective in treating the most serious depressions. As she said in her second book, “Shock: The Therapeutic Power of Electrosisal Therapy” (2006), written by journalist Larry Tye, returned to it as a last resort.
To her surprise, she said, the ECT gave her back her life, lifting a cloud from her mind and allowed her to experience a complete range of emotions. She said that the existence of a clearer mind helped her stop alcohol and cigarettes and allowed her to deal with emotions too far.
“It’s not an ECT per se that heals me from these bad habits,” he wrote. “It stays well enough for a long time so that I can start examining the behaviors I want to change.”
He added: “I hate to lose memories, which means to lose control of my past and mind, but the control ECT gives me over the disabled my depression is worth this relatively low cost.
