DUKAKIS TAKES UP HER BEST – AND MOST IMPORTANT – CAMPAIGN

Toledo Blade, OH
Sept 24 2006

You haven’t heard from Kitty Dukakis for a long time. Not that she’s
disappeared. The wife of the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee has
been toiling quietly, doing good works, helping to resettle refugees
and to rekindle the American conscience. But Mrs. Dukakis is being
quiet no longer, and she has something to tell us all.

Not that she suffers from depression. A lot of people knew that, were
aware of it for decades, and Mrs. Dukakis herself long has admitted
to resorting to pills, and to alcohol, even to nail polish remover
and hair spray, to soften her hurt and to get through the day, and
then to get through the night. For even during the day, even during
the good days, there were parts of her life that were a nightmare.

The thing she has to tell us is that she’s found some comfort – not in
amphetamines (which she took for two decades, hiding her desperation
even from her husband), nor from rubbing alcohol, nor even from more
conventional spirits – and has found her voice. She’s aiming to take
the stigma away from depression, and from its treatments.

The comfort comes from electroconvulsive therapy, a once-dreaded
procedure that involves applying a very brief burst of electric
stimulus to the brain. This therapy has been around for more than
six decades, and so has the concern about short- and medium-term
memory loss – so much so that the National Mental Health Association
characterizes ECT, as it is often called, as "the most controversial
psychiatric treatment."

But today, because of modern anesthesia techniques, ECT is far more
conventional and effective. "This is a procedure that can change
peoples’ lives," says Paul J. Friday, a clinical psychologist at the
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. Early movies showed grim,
unruly psychiatric patients in holding cells enduring a treatment
that was just short of torture.

"Where we are right now is very scientifically driven, much more
appropriate," says Dr. Friday, "and I have several patients who
without it would probably have committed suicide."

Mrs. Dukakis now feels better, so very much better, and she’s become
something of a campaigner for the benefits of ECT and a warrior
against stubborn stereotypes about depression. For Mrs. Dukakis,
who joined her husband Michael on four gubernatorial campaigns and
one presidential campaign, this is the last, best campaign.

And maybe the most important. This campaign includes television
appearances, a book (written with Larry Tye and carrying the title
Shock), and an evangelical zeal. And, Kitty being Kitty – a harmless
phrase today but one that once meant waves of trepidation for her
family and for aides in the Massachusetts State House and on the
campaign plane – there are anecdotes galore.

Here’s one she likes: "The other day I was having my nails done. A
woman came up to me whom I had seen in town many, many times. She heard
I had a book coming out. When she left, another woman sidled up to me,
whispering, saying that her son had depression and was reluctant to
tell anybody. That kind of summarizes what goes on.

There is such a stigma. My effort is to destigmatize it. I remember
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We have to get away from that."

Mrs. Dukakis first became aware of depression in 1982, when her
husband was trying to retake the governor’s office he had lost in
a humiliating primary defeat to the late Edward J. King in 1978 –
an event Mrs. Dukakis so regularly referred to as "a public death"
that the phrase has become inextricably linked to the episode.

She stopped taking diet pills in the middle of that campaign, still
regarded as one of the most bruising in the state’s history, and fell
into depression.

"I went through cycles," she says. "Anti-depressants didn’t work,
or worked for a very short period of time, and toward the end of the
cycles I would start to drink, I was so desperate. There was a deep,
dark hole."

She lived in that dark hole for years, though not, remarkably, during
the 1988 presidential campaign, when Gov. Dukakis emerged from the
Democratic field, received his party’s nomination at a triumphant
convention in Atlanta, and approached the general election with a
big lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush .

"The excitement of the campaign and the learning of the campaign
were enough of a stimulus to hold me off," she says. "Then there
was a letdown. But my depression was not based on some reality in
my life, like losing the campaign. I was exhausted, of course, and
disappointed, but I would have been depressed anyway. It would have
come every eight or nine months because it always did."

Katharine Dickson Dukakis, who is approaching her 70th birthday, was
one of the founders of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has
been active in refugee affairs, and has been deeply involved in efforts
with Armenian Americans to cast light on the horrors of genocide.

But her legacy may be the forthrightness with which she has attacked
depression and shared her experiences.

"I noticed that when I started telling people they would look at me
and be horribly uncomfortable," she says. "But I tell people I have
– had – a mental-health problem that was very serious, that my life
wasn’t worth living, just wasn’t, it was so horrible. I don’t want
to talk about this in whispers. It is painful enough to go through
depression and then to be embarrassed or reluctant to ever say anything
to anybody when you are feeling better."

Re-read that paragraph and I guarantee one phrase will stick out,
the one about having a life that wasn’t worth living. Mrs. Dukakis has
disproved that, and, Republican or Democrat, we’re the beneficiaries.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress