Sunshine from Darkness is honored to bestow our 2011 Luminary Award upon Olympic figure skater Dorothy Hamill.

In the public's eyes, skater Dorothy Hamill was "America's sweetheart." In 1976, she was the perky 19-year-old with the famous hairdo — "the wedge" — who won an Olympic gold medal for her dazzling figure skating at the Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria. Her life seemed to glide as easily as her skates. But as Hamill reveals in her frank new book, A Skating Life: My Story, that behind the scenes, she was in the grip of serious depression, which ran through her family.  

“It was a Tuesday afternoon… about 2 o’clock.  I was standing in my kitchen when I got the call.  I will never forget that day” says Dorothy Kreisman when asked about her daughter’s illness.  Diane was a sophomore at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. when she made the call to her parents that afternoon in early 1975: “Mom, something just doesn’t feel right with me…I don’t know what’s wrong…In class, I listen to the professor and I can’t retain what he is saying…When I read my textbooks, I can’t remember or understand what I just read.  Some days, I can’t even get out of bed.”  Diane Kreisman was then just 19 years old.  

For the first time in her life, she began feeling overwhelmed by high levels of anxiety and severe symptoms of depression that interfered with her ability to carry out her normal, day to day activities and perform well in school.  Her parents, Norman and Dorothy, describe that afternoon as the start of a long journey that eventually took them from Long Island, New York to sunny Sarasota, Florida more than 11 years later.

Emily Walsh, who suffers from depression, and Diane Kreisman, who has schizophrenia, speak about their illnesses.