Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness - Softcover

Tallis, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560256478 ISBN 13: 9781560256472

Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2005

Synopsis

Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses, superstitious or ritualistic compulsions, delusion, the inability to concentrate—exhibiting just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of a major depressive episode. Yet we all subconsciously welcome these symptoms when we allow ourselves to fall in love. In Love Sick, Dr. Frank Tallis, a leading authority on obsessive disorders, considers our experiences and expressions of love, and why the combinations of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterize what we mean when we speak of falling in love. Tallis examines why the agony associated with romantic love continues to be such a popular subject for poets, philosophers, songwriters, and scientists, and questions just how healthy our attitudes are and whether there may in fact be more sane, less tortured ways to love. A highly informative exploration of how, throughout time, principally in the West, the symptoms of mental illness have been used to describe the state of being in love, this book offers an eloquent, thought-provoking, and endlessly illuminating look at one of the most important aspects of human behavior.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

The idea that romantic passion is a mental illness may not be the most welcome message for Valentine's Day, but Tallis, a British clinical psychologist, acknowledges that it's a condition for which we may never want a cure. Tallis includes a good deal of research testifying to the obsessive nature and destructive power of romance. He begins by tracing the medical diagnosis of love based on physical symptoms to the Greek physician Galen. Leaning heavily on Darwin, Tallis considers the role of love in perpetuating the species: for instance, he notes, hidden ovulation in women (rather than the loudly advertised ovulation of chimpanzees, whose rear ends turn bright red) may secure a man's fidelity, since he doesn't know when she is most fertile. Based on the results of a survey conducted by a marketing consultant, the author surmises that men fall in love more often than women and experience the emotion more intensely. He also cites a study showing a low divorce rate in Asian cultures with arranged marriages as proof that these marriages are more satisfactory than Western marriages. Lauding rationality in the choice of a mate, he makes questionable comparisons between the role of dating services in the West and arranged marriages in the East. He ends this lively but not always convincing study with the unromantic conclusion that amity and mutual understanding must balance passion for love to last.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1560256478
• ISBN 13: 9781560256472
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 332