Have just been finding out about St Dymphna as in Airswimming, Dora and Persephone are insititutionalised in St. Dymphna's Hospital for the Criminially Insane. Thought maybe she was made up but apparently not...and there is also a St. Dymphna's Physchiatric Hospital in Ireland. St. Dymphna is the patron saint of those who suffer from mental illness.
She was born in Ireland, where her father was a king and her mother died when Dymphna was in her teens. Struck by grief and mental illness, her father made sexual advances towards her. She fled to Belgium but her father tracked her down and begged her to return to Ireland where he decapitated her. Gruesome!
I first read this play years ago; Dora and Persephone were insitutionalised in the 1920's and I still find it hard to imagine how that must feel - to be taken from your home and family in your early twenties and locked away in a mental hospital for 50 years. How to relate to that one is going to be one mammouth challenge. I feel like climbing the walls when I spend more than a day in my flat, so maybe that's a start but after that length of time in the same place...how could you remain even slightly sane?
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