Wary of Treatment

During the 1988 campaign, Mrs. Dukakis said, she generally limited herself to one shot of vodka at night, though she did go on a couple of benders that forced her to cancel appearances. All that changed with the election, when her husband lost 40 states to George Bush.

Two days later, her long-masked depression came roaring back; she lost herself in the bottle and spent the next several years in and out of rehab.

In the mornings, she would see her husband off to work, then drink, retreat to her room and pass out. Her family sometimes found her passed out in her vomit.

“Once I came home and couldn’t find her,” Mr. Dukakis recalled. “I finally went up to the third floor, and I saw what I thought was a bunch of rags on the floor. It was my wife. This beautiful …” His voice broke off. “Jesus,” he said.

Though she and her husband had heard about electroconvulsive therapy, they were wary. Mr. Dukakis’s older brother, Stelian, had had an ECT session in 1951 and was never the same.

Mrs. Dukakis’s sister’s husband also had ECT therapy in the 1950s but had kept it secret. When he learned that Mrs. Dukakis was considering it, he told her that he had had a positive outcome; he lost some memory, but his psychosis was gone.

Benefits, With Risks

No one knows exactly how electroshock eases depression, if only temporarily, in many people. It sends an electrical current to the brain that triggers a brief seizure. The result is like rebooting a computer, say those who have had positive results.