In this paper, we present a simple artificial damping method to enhance the robustness of total Lagrangian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (TL-SPH). Specifically, an artificial damping stress based on the Kelvin-Voigt type damper with a scaling factor imitating a von Neumann-Richtmyer type artificial viscosity is introduced in the constitutive equation to alleviate the spurious oscillation in the vicinity of the sharp spatial gradients. After validating the robustness and accuracy of the present method with a set of benchmark tests with very challenging cases, we demonstrate its potentials in the field of bio-mechanics by simulating the deformation of complex stent structures.