Kitty Dukakis: In Memoriam

 

NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/us/politics/kitty-dukakis-dead.html

Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/03/22/kitty-dukakis-michael-alcoholism-mental-health-dead/

From the NY Times:

She and her husband believed that her drinking was driven by a deep-seated depression, but antidepressants and talk therapy were not helping. They spent almost two decades searching for treatment while she went in and out of rehab.

Finally, they learned about electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, a procedure that can wipe out a person’s memory but can also be highly effective in treating the most severe depressions. As she said in her second book, “Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy” (2006), written with the journalist Larry Tye, she turned to it as a last resort.

To her surprise, she said, ECT gave her back her life, lifting a cloud from her mind and allowing her to experience a full range of feelings. She said that having a clearer mind helped her quit alcohol and cigarettes and allowed her to confront emotions long out of reach.

“It is not ECT per se that is curing me of those bad habits,” she wrote. “It is staying well enough for long enough that I can start looking at behaviors I want to change.”

She added, “I hate losing memories, which means losing control over my past and my mind, but the control ECT gives me over my disabling depression is worth this relatively minor cost. It just is.”

From the Washington Post:

In desperation, she turned in 2001 to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The method, formerly called shock therapy, had long been held in the popular imagination to be barbaric, a conception reinforced by the Oscar-winning 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which is set in a mental institution. In one graphic scene, Jack Nicholson’s character is held down and sent into seizures by electric shock.

Mrs. Dukakis’s doctor reassured her that the procedure, in its modern form, was a safe, comfortable and effective way to treat severe depression.

She had her first treatment the morning of June 20, 2001, the Dukakises’ 38th wedding anniversary, and awoke, she said, feeling immediate relief. As the former governor was driving her back to their Brookline home, Mrs. Dukakis, in a stunning shift in her demeanor, said, “Let’s go out to dinner tonight!”

For Mrs. Dukakis, the shock treatments worked so quickly and so well that she called them a “miracle in our lives.” With journalist and author Larry Tye, she wrote the 2006 book “Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy.” In speeches and interviews, Mrs. Dukakis noted that temporary memory deficits were associated with the treatment and that she required regular maintenance sessions. But she and her husband became vigorous proponents for ECT.

“Kitty Dukakis was the most prominent person in the world to ever stand up and say, ‘ECT worked for me, and we ought to look at what the health and science implications of it are,’” Tye said. “She managed to take every one of her infirmities and every one of the incredible trials in her life and figure out a way that other people could benefit from them.”

Kitty Dukakis was an outspoken champion of ECT and a beloved member of our community.

She came to ECT meetings around the world over the years.

Her passing has put ECT in the spotlight with obituaries in major newspapers. Note the difference in tone about ECT in the two pieces above, with the NY Times obituary highlighting adverse cognitive outcomes.