Your Donation Makes a Difference
Our mission is to engage, inform and champion our global community to improve the lives of people with idiopathic hypersomnia and related sleep disorders
If you know someone with a rare hypersomnia disorder, or have one yourself, we’re glad you found us! We invite you to be part of our mission by making a donation today.
The Hypersomnia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and the leading patient advocacy group for people with idiopathic hypersomnia (IH) and related sleep disorders.
Ways to Give:
Matching Donations
Many employers will match employees’ donations to 501(c)(3) organizations like the Hypersomnia Foundation. When you donate, please ask your company if they have a matching program, to make your donation go even further! (If your company does not have a matching program, please consider donating through one of the above routes, in order to avoid fees. For example, Benevity charges an 8% processing fee, which reduces the amount of your donation that HF actually receives.)
“I know someone who has IH and I want to help, but I don’t really understand what IH is!”
Most people are familiar with insomnia – problems going to sleep and/or staying asleep. In contrast, people with idiopathic hypersomnia (IH) struggle to wake up and struggle to stay awake throughout the day—even though they may have slept well the night before. And napping doesn’t help.
Think back to a time when you felt very tired or sleepy during the day. You probably had trouble focusing on tasks and your “to do” list. Chances are, you eventually napped or got a full night’s sleep—what a relief! But imagine if there was no relief. And then imagine you had trouble waking every morning, and then had to fight to stay awake all day, every day—and a nap or a full night’s sleep didn’t make you feel any better. It would be like having terrible jet lag that never went away.
It’s not hard to see how that persistent, overwhelming need to sleep would almost certainly affect your ability to study, hold down a job, raise a child, and maintain relationships with friends and family. Sleeping Beauty may have been a dreamy fairy tale, but having IH is more like a nightmare.
Idiopathic hypersomnia (IH) is a chronic, neurological disorder. At this time, there are no FDA-approved treatments, and there is no cure. People with IH are usually treated with medications approved for narcolepsy – a related sleep disorder – with varying levels of success. These medications can help, but they do not solve the struggle to stay awake. For some people they don’t help at all, and others develop a tolerance to the medications over time.
NOTE: There are several forms of hypersomnias – in addition to IH, there are narcolepsy, Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS), and hypersomnias related to certain other conditions. While the Hypersomnia Foundation focuses on IH, we provide our free resources to all of these hypersomnia communities.
Your Donations Go Further… Learn More
Most of us donate to causes that have the greatest meaning for us personally. If you have or know someone with a rare disorder, donating to a related patient advocacy group is absolutely essential for raising awareness and promoting research. (A rare disorder means a very small pool of donors, which means EVERY donation has much more impact!)
The Hypersomnia Foundation does not have an office and has a very small staff. What we do have is a team of dedicated, hard-working volunteers, motivated to make a difference in the lives of people who have IH and related sleep disorders. Everyone on the Board of HF is also a regular donor. See more about what we do and how our donations are spent in our annual report.