If you are thinking about ending your life, stop reading and call or text 988 — the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, free and open all night. Veterans press 1. That is not instead of praying. It is the first thing.
Historical Context
Depression Is Not the Sin of Despair
This has to be dealt with first, because a lot of Catholics find the wrong paragraph on their own and draw a terrible conclusion from it.
The Catechism does treat despair as a sin: “By despair, man ceases to hope for his personal salvation from God, for help in attaining it or for the forgiveness of his sins” (CCC 2091). That is a deliberate act of the will — a settled refusal of God’s mercy.
Depression is not that. It is an illness that attacks the capacity to feel hope, which is a different thing from choosing to reject it. And the Catechism says so in its own terms, a few hundred paragraphs earlier: “Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors” (CCC 1735).
So: if you cannot feel hope, you have not committed a sin. You have a symptom. Take it to a doctor and take it to God, in either order.
Prayer to Saint Dymphna
The traditional prayer, and the one to say when you cannot manage anything longer:
Lord, our God, you graciously chose Saint Dymphna
as patroness of those afflicted with mental and nervous disorders.
Please grant, Lord, through the prayers of this pure youthful martyr,
relief and consolation to all suffering such trials,
and especially those for whom we pray.
Grant them patience in their sufferings.
Please fill them with hope,
and grant them the relief and cure they so much desire.
We ask this through Christ our Lord,
who suffered agony in the garden.
Amen.
Dymphna was a fifteen-year-old girl who fled a father whose mind had broken, and spent the end of her life caring for people whose minds were breaking too. She has a page of her own, including what the town where she died went on to do about the mentally ill, which is the best part of the story.
Psalm 88 — the One That Does Not Resolve
Almost every psalm of lament turns upward before the end. This one does not, and the Church left it in the psalter anyway, and prays it.
O Lord, why do you cast me off?
Why do you hide your face from me?
Afflicted and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
You have caused lover and friend to shun me;
my companions are in darkness.
— Psalm 88:14–15, 18
That is the last verse. There is no turn, no resolution, no “yet will I praise him.” If you have ever been told that a Christian should not pray like that, Psalm 88 is the answer: the Church put a prayer with no happy ending into the mouths of the faithful and has kept it there for three thousand years.
A Prayer for a Day I Cannot Face
Lord, I am not going to pretend to you.
I do not want to get up and I do not want to be here.
I am not asking to feel better by lunchtime.
Get me through the next hour.
Then do it again.
Keep me from deciding anything permanent today.
Send one person who asks how I actually am
and waits for the answer.
Amen.
A Prayer When the Treatment Is Not Working
Father, I have done the things I was told to do
and I am still here in the dark.
I am tired of being patient about it.
Give my doctors the wit to try something else.
Keep me from giving up on the next attempt
because the last four failed.
And where I cannot feel you at all,
be there anyway.
Saint Dymphna, pray for me.
Amen.
What Else to Actually Do
Prayer is not the whole of the Church’s answer and was never meant to be.
See a doctor. Depression is treated, often well. Treating it is not a shortcut around suffering and no priest will tell you it is.
Tell one person the truth. The specific lie depression tells is that everybody would be better off not hearing it. Gethsemane is Christ saying it out loud and asking for company.
Ask for the Anointing of the Sick. Less known, but serious mental illness is illness, and the sacrament is not restricted to physical disease. Ask your parish.
Go to Mass even when you feel nothing. The Mass does not require you to feel anything for it to be what it is. On the bad weeks this is a relief rather than an obligation.
Best Times for This Prayer
- In the first hour of the morning, which is usually the worst one.
- On 15 May, the feast of St Dymphna.
- When medication is being started or changed.
- During a relapse, when the last recovery starts to look like luck.
- On the anniversary of whatever started it.
- By the people who live with someone depressed, who get tired too.
Scripture Connection
“It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.” — 1 Kings 19:4
Elijah says this under a broom tree in the desert, days after the greatest victory of his career. God’s response is not a rebuke and not an explanation. An angel brings him food and tells him to sleep, twice, and only after he has eaten and rested twice does anything else happen — and then God is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in a small quiet voice.
Food, sleep, and someone turning up. It is the oldest treatment plan in Scripture and it is remarkably close to the modern one.
Related prayers
St Dymphna has her own page. For the mind failing in a different way, see the Prayer for Alzheimer’s, which is built on her too.
If what you are carrying is grief rather than illness, the Prayer for Dad in Heaven covers praying for the dead. If drink has become part of it, the Set Aside Prayer and the Resentment Prayer come out of recovery, where this ground is very well worn. And the Memorare is the prayer for when you have no words of your own left.
