Prayers for Mental Health
Prayer is not a substitute for care, and nothing here should replace a doctor, a counsellor, or medication. It is a companion to them. These prayers are for the days treatment does not reach — the flatness, the noise, the shame that tells you not to say any of it out loud.
They come from Scripture, from monastic tradition, and from saints who wrote plainly about darkness. They do not promise a quick lifting. They give you words when your own have run out.
29 prayers
- A Prayer Before a Difficult Day
A contemporary pastoral prayer for anticipatory anxiety — the dread that arrives before an exam, a diagnosis, a court date, or a hard…
- A Prayer for a Grieving Heart
A contemporary pastoral prayer that follows the biblical pattern of lament, closing with the ancient Requiem aeternam used across the…
- A Prayer for All Conditions of Men
Added to the Prayer Book in 1662 and attributed to Bishop Peter Gunning, this is the great Anglican intercession for the world, the Church,…
- A Prayer for Caregivers
A contemporary pastoral prayer for those caring for the sick, the elderly, the disabled, or a family member in crisis, drawing on Isaiah…
- A Prayer for Freedom from Addiction
A contemporary pastoral prayer drawing on the recovery tradition that grew out of the Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous, and on the…
- A Prayer for Letting Go of What I Cannot Control
A contemporary pastoral prayer in the lineage of the Serenity Prayer and of Ignatian indifference — the practice of holding all things…
- A Prayer for Peace of Mind
A contemporary pastoral prayer woven from Psalm 46:10, Psalm 131, and Psalm 127:2. It is written for rumination — the mental loop that…
- A Prayer in Anxiety
A contemporary pastoral prayer shaped around Philippians 4:6–7 and Christ's words in Matthew 6. Anxiety is not treated as a failure of…
- A Prayer in Depression
A contemporary pastoral prayer in the tradition of Psalm 42 and 88 — psalms the Church has always kept in its prayer book precisely because…
- A Prayer in Loneliness
A contemporary pastoral prayer rooted in Christ's abandonment in Gethsemane and in the long monastic tradition of naming solitude honestly.…
- A Prayer When Life Feels Unbearable
A contemporary pastoral prayer for moments of despair, grounded in Christ's own agony in Gethsemane and cry of abandonment from the cross.…
- Breaking the Spirit of Death
A prayer against what deliverance ministry calls "the spirit of death" — the settled interior orientation toward despair and…
- For Breaking the Wall Built Up Around the Heart
A prayer for the interior hardening that follows deep hurt, which spiritual directors and deliverance ministers alike identify as one of…
- John Henry Newman — Support Us All the Day Long
Adapted from a sermon by St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and now found in Anglican, Catholic, and Methodist prayer books. It is prayed at…
- Keep Watch, Dear Lord
An ancient Compline collect attributed to St. Augustine and carried into the Book of Common Prayer. It is the classic prayer for insomnia…
- Prayer Against Oppression
Catholic theology distinguishes several degrees of extraordinary demonic activity — temptation, oppression, obsession, infestation and,…
- Prayer for Forgiveness of Self
A modern prayer for the scrupulous and the self-condemning, built on Romans 8:1. The Christian tradition distinguishes godly sorrow, which…
- Prayer for Troubled Souls
A gentler prayer offered for those under interior affliction, which the deliverance tradition treats as a distinct and far more common…
- Prayer in Time of Anxiety
A contemporary prayer for anxious nights, in the tradition of the psalms of lament, which never pretend the distress away but speak it…
- Prayer of Deliverance
A litany-form deliverance prayer widely used in Italian Catholic practice and circulated in English through Fr. Gabriele Amorth and later…
- Prayer to Protect the Faculties
A precise prayer reflecting the Catholic anatomy of the soul as it comes down from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas: intellect, will,…
- Prayer to St. Dymphna for Mental Health
St. Dymphna, according to a thirteenth-century account, was an Irish girl of the seventh century who fled her father's madness and was…
- Psalm 137 — By the Rivers of Babylon
The exiles' lament, refusing to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. Its closing verses are among the hardest in scripture and are…
- Psalm 139 — Thou Hast Searched Me and Known Me
Psalm 139 is the great prayer against loneliness. It insists that there is no place — height, depth, distance, or darkness — where a person…
- Psalm 42 — Why Art Thou Cast Down, O My Soul
Psalm 42 is the Bible's clearest prayer of depression. Written by the sons of Korah, likely in exile far from the Temple, it describes a…
- Psalm 88 — Lord, God of My Salvation
The darkest psalm in the psalter: it ends without resolution, with darkness as the psalmist's only companion. The Church prays it at…
- Surrender Novena (Day One)
Received by Fr. Don Dolindo Ruotolo (1882-1970), the Neapolitan priest whom Padre Pio told his own visitors to consult. Each of the nine…
- The Serenity Prayer
Written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s and adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, this short prayer has probably done more practical…
- Thomas Merton — The Road Ahead
Written by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and published in Thoughts in Solitude (1958). It has become one of the most widely prayed modern…