Middletown >> It seemed as if the entire community filled the Twin Pine Casino Event Center in Middletown Saturday night to support The Wave of Hope, an organization that seeks to remove the stigma surrounding depression. The sold-out event featured food, music, dancing and a live and silent auction. Twenty-one photographs and personal stories from people who have overcome depression lined a corner of the room.
“We are the biggest event of its kind in the casino to date,” said the Wave of Hope founder Sharon Dawson.
The Wave of Hope officially began ten months ago, but the idea came into being a year before the organization’s debut. In May of 2013, Dawson’s friend, who had just come from a luncheon hosted by Hospice, informed her that Lake County has the highest rate of suicide in the state. This deeply troubled Dawson. “Then I called Hospice and they said the highest rate of suicide times three. This is a hard statistic to track but by and large we’re way up there,” Dawson said. “And I’d never heard about anyone killing themselves and I know a lot of people … That was really upsetting to me and I’ve been here 30 years. I love it here.”
Dawson remembered that crisis hotline cards used to be available all around the county and she wanted to know where they had gone. She was told that businesses didn’t want to carry them because they were worried about the association with depression. “Sixty-two years old, that was the very first time I’d ever heard there was a stigma about this,” she said. “I guess on a lot of levels I’m a very intelligent person but I guess I’m naive on other levels because that shocked me. There’s a stigma about people going through a hard time. I don’t care who you are, because if you’ve never been through a hard time you’re either lying to me or it’s coming.”
No matter someone’s situation, Dawson feels that at one point or another, everyone comes face to face with difficulties. “People run up against a wall of depression,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be clinical depression, but if you live long enough you’re going to hit that wall. It might be a thinner wall than you think, but when you hit it, you hit it.”
Dawson decided then and there that she would take action against the stigma of depression. “I have a hard time with stupid and that is my definition of stupid,” she said. “That’s fear-based and to me fear-based is usually stupid.”
Without realizing where the project would take her, she turned to social media for help. “I put it out there on Facebook. I said, ‘I want 20 people to come and tell me their stories,’” she said. “Never dreamed I would get up the next day and have 15 private messages of people who were ready to do it. And then I went, ‘Oh my god, I’m really doing this.’ I didn’t know I was really doing this.”
A year later Dawson unveiled the Wave of Hope to an unexpected amount of support from the community. The organization raised $11,000 in just 22 days. “Mostly Middletown just hammered me with $20 bills and $5 bills,” she said. “Middletown is my home and Middletown gave me what they could and they got me on my feet to do this and we have to keep going and they are right behind me.”
Heading into her project, Dawson’s goal was to show people suffering with depression that they’re not alone. “The people in the Wave of Hope say, you are not the only one, you are not the only one that’s been here,” she said. “They’ve been though hard times and they have something to say to people that might be in their shoes … You’ve got so much social pressure and social media and you are afraid to say anything because you’re ashamed or you think you’re the only person. This is normal, they’re normal people … These are normal people who went through a really hard time and came out of it, and what they would say.”
Dawson was amazed by the variety of individuals who reached out to her. “We have a myriad of stories form a woman who was falsely accused of murder to a man who lost his wife to cancer after 30 years … Every last one of these people has something different to say which I found fascinating,” she said. “When I interview these people, I give them three questions: Where were you, how did you get through it and what would you say to somebody? I thought they were all going to say the same thing. Read the last paragraph of every single one of these [stories], totally different pieces of advice for every different situation.”
As a practiced photographer and writer, Dawson tackled many aspects of the project herself. “We do the stories, we do the photos and they sign off on the photos and then I also do the interviews, but that’s months down the road,” she said. “I let them read their stories. If they say, ‘I just can’t do this,’ then we’re done, no fault no harm.”
Dawson said that these stories and photographs have had an immense impact on many people. “We would do this if we cold save one life and touch one person,” she said. “I know for a fact we have done much more than that. It’s made a difference and that’s all we ever wanted to do. We made a bigger difference than we ever thought we could.”
The Wave of Hope has also been spread far and wide. “Ten months later, the wave has been in 20 different places and three different counties,” she said. “We want to make this available for everybody because everybody has a story but not everybody has somebody they can tell it to or who will listen to their story.”
The organization is just getting started and thanks to Saturday’s fundraiser, they’re well on their way to creating a second wave. “All the money will go to the creation of the second wave, which will be 20 more stories, 20 more people,” Dawson said. “Everybody has a story and everybody needs to be able to hear one and be able to tell one.”
The second wave will hopefully debut in June.
The organization has also made its way into Lower Lake High School, equipped with the stories of Duffy, Ana and David. “We take those particular three because they are pertinent to the age group,” Dawson explained. “And we go in and we talk to them and we read their story. Duffy was really, really messed up in high school and suicidal around the age of 11 through 13 … She talked about how she learned how it felt to have a compliment and she remembers her first compliment and now she gives them even to random people.” Ana and David also had a difficult time in high school, but came out on the other side of their depression.
Dawson said she knows that stories such as these are beneficial for students. “We have amazing letters from these kids and it’s really awesome,” she said. “And Lower Lake High School is very progressive in their thinking and they need a lot of kudos for that.”
Though Dawson founded the Wave of Hope, she feels that she receives too much misplaced attention. “I get a lot of kudos for doing this because I’m the face of it … but people need to understand I’m just the person on the front line with support,” she said. “There are 21 people right now in the Wave of Hope who have poured their hearts out to the whole world in the hope that someone will make a different decision and not feel like they are the only one.”
She also gives credit to her colleagues. “The other thing is there is a team of people behind me, my board of directors. I’m shocked anyone is still speaking to me because I can be a bear and this is not a one person job and it never has been,” she said. “I took the photos, I did the stories. There’s a lot of work around that, I wont lie about that, but it doesn’t make it the most important part of this.”
Dawson emphasized that the attention needs to be given to the people who volunteered to have their portraits taken and their stories told. “I get way too much credit because this would not exist without these beautiful, wonderful people,” she said. “They’re the brave people.”
To work with so many of these courageous individuals has been a dream for Dawson. “To take the portraits, for me as an artist, to take portraits of people – and I can see them, really really really see them – as an artist I can’t ask for anything more, I really can’t,” she said. “I call them my waves and I love them. This is like a whole other family for me. I want it to be a family for the whole wide world … and I want that family to get bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
