Saint Dymphna of Geel

Thank you to my sister Sarah for finding this cool podcast (transcript) and article about Saint Dymphna of Geel, Belgium, the patron saint of mental health. Many mentally ill people visit her shrine every year seeking relief from mental distress and the most incredible thing of all is that the people of the town take them in and often make them lifelong parts of their family. The doctors who send the boarders (as they’re called) to the families do not share that person’s diagnosis.

It all works in large part because of a willingness to let the boarders be strange while holding healthy boundaries. There are stories of one host mom coming in to scare away the ferocious lions that one boarder would see coming out of his walls at night. Another host mom sews buttons onto the shirt of her boarder every night so that he can twist them off every day an ease his anxiety. Nobody is focused on trying to cure the mental illness — just adapt to it. At times 25% of the town has been mentally ill boarders, it’s been called the Paradise of the Insane. They describe the local cafe dispatching coffees to all their customers equally, including those who are visibly psychotic. I vow to visit this town someday and bask the nuerodiverse glow!

The part that hit me in the gut was when the story’s protagonist, Ellen Baxter, described posing her research question to the host families — “is this mentally ill boarder a burden to you”. They all responded with a resounding “no”. Hearing this, I collapsed into tears (but what else is new). I’ve been trying to imagine what it would feel like to not feel like a burden, even while I’m quite high-functioning most of the time. I’m not quite there yet.

I also weep at the thought of what living in such a supportive environment could have meant for my mother and my ancestors, could still mean for myself, my sister, and our families future generations. For my friends. For people I don’t know at all but whose suffering punches a hole through my chest. All the unwell black men murdered by the police when someone makes the mistake of trusting 911 during a crisis.

I was also struck by how part of the success is that people aren’t living with their own families. They cite a study showing that when people come home after a psychiatric hospitalization, they’re most likely to end up re-hospitalized when their family treats them with criticism, hostility and emotional over-involvement. “strangers are better healers because on some far, far away level, they don’t really care if you get better.” Maybe this explains why peer respites can be so successful also.

This feels to me like an example of religion at its best — we designate a sacred figure in a specific place to be supportive of a specific area of human need, and it then inspires the humans in that area to step up and do something extraordinary on a massive collective scale. It creates an extraordinarily beautiful culture and heritage that is transmitted intergenerationally — a sense of service and solidarity that is transcendent. And it gives humans in need a place and rituals to attach hope to.

Along those lines, I am interested in setting up some sort of shrine to Mother Cabrini, the Catholic patron saint of migration, in Sunset Park, perhaps connected to the sacred elm tree in the center of the park. “In America I will stay”.

Love love love,

E.Ro