Kitty Dukakis

Diagnoses

Vocation

Traits

Family

American political wife of Michael Dukakis; three kids. They married 6/20/1963, five months after he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, his first political office. The limelight was focused on the family when he ran for the Presidential nomination February 1987. She is Jewish, he Greek Orthodox, they raised their kids to consider both faiths. Dukakis studied and taught modern dance for 30 years. In June 1988 she had surgery to remove two herniated disks in her neck and replace them with bone taken from her hip. Her condition was possibly due to the rigors of her dance history. In 1982, she quietly underwent treatment for a 26-year addiction to diet pills. In January 1989, she entered an alcohol treatment program in Rhode Island. Suffering from depression and diagnosed as manic-depressive, she was admitted to the hospital in November 1989 for drinking rubbing alcohol. Addressing the focus of publicity due to her husband's career, she wrote an autobiography, "Now You Know." In 1993, she went back to school, training for social work. Her father , Harry Ellis Dickson, noted musician and music director/guest conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, died on March 29, 2003 in a Jamaica Plain (MA) hospital. He was 94. Just four days later, her mother-in-law died at a retirement facility in the same city. On July 23, 2003 she revealed that she has had electro-shock treatments for her mental illness during the two years prior. She has the treatments approximately once every eight months and says they have helped her tremendously. Link to Wikipedia biography