Katharine "Kitty" Dukakis, MS, MSW, mental health and human rights advocate and former First Lady of Massachusetts, will be the featured speaker and awardee at the Yale Department of Psychiatry's annual neuroscience conference on April 22, 2017.
Neuroscience 2017: Paths to Recovery will be held from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm at Harkness Auditorium in the Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar St., New Haven. Admission is free and open to the public, but advance registration is requested by clicking here.
The symposium showcases advances in basic and clinical neuroscience. Presentations are non-technical in nature and geared toward the general public. In addition to remarks by Mrs. Dukakis, faculty from Yale's Department of Psychiatry will speak. There will be ample time for questions from the audience.
Mrs. Dukakis will be honored with the department's Research Advocacy Award for her extensive work on issues related to mental health, women's rights, human rights, and the arts.
She has written two books, including "Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy," which tells the story of how ECT proved to be the one treatment that dealt effectively with her recurring cycles of depression. She has become a widely admired advocate for ECT, and was a presenter at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 2007.
Mrs. Dukakis was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the President's Commission on the Holocaust. She then became a founding member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. She has worked extensively on issues related to the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and contemporary human rights issues. In 1985 she participated in a fact-finding tour of refugee camps in Thailand and organized a task force on Cambodian children which helped to win the admission of hundreds of Cambodian children who had lost their parents in the Cambodian genocide to the U.S. and other countries.
She and her husband, Michael S. Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts and 1988 candidate for U.S. president, live in Massachusetts.