Patron Saint of Anxiety
St. Dymphna, feast day 15 May
St. Dymphna is the patron saint of anxiety, depression and mental illness, with her feast on 15 May. Her shrine town of Geel in Belgium became one of the oldest community mental-health traditions in Europe. AngelGuard publishes her story and how to pray with her alongside treatment.
Quick facts
Why St. Dymphna?
By tradition Dymphna was a young Irish woman of the seventh century whose father lost his mind after her mother’s death. She fled to Belgium to escape him, and he found her at Geel and killed her. What happened afterwards is the part that matters. Geel became a place of pilgrimage for people suffering mental illness, and from the medieval period the townspeople began taking sufferers into their own homes. That practice ran for centuries and is still partly in place. It is one of the oldest models of community mental health care in Europe, and it grew out of her shrine. So the patronage is not decorative. It is attached to a place where, for something like seven hundred years, ordinary families housed people that most of Europe was locking up. The honest caution belongs here as much as anywhere. Anxiety and depression are medical conditions. Asking Dymphna’s intercession is not an alternative to treating them any more than praying about a broken leg is an alternative to setting it, and Catholics have never been asked to choose between the two.
How to ask their intercession
Name the thing plainly rather than in general terms; prayers about mental health collapse into vagueness faster than most. If you are asking on someone else’s behalf, tell them you are doing it, because the isolation is half the illness. And if you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line now.