Diagnosing Love. - For psychology diggers.

" Love is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing. "

Lovesick:

- A Mental Illness

Often associated with:

• Obsession (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)
• Depression
• Mania
• Manic Depression
• Generalised Anxiety Disorder
• Anorexia Nervosa
• Derealisation
• Depersonalisation

Others physical symptoms:

• Pounding Heart
• Trembling
• Shortness of Breath
• Feeling lightheaded

Obsession

• Trigger high levels of anxiety
• Affected individual attempts to reduce (often unsuccessfully) by performing certain actions.
• Often superstitious or ritualistic and can be enacted internally (for example, repeating a lucky number) or externally (arranging objects symmetrically).

Lovers experience thoughts, impulses, and images that are recurrent, persistent, and difficult to dismiss: fantasies, day-dreams, and irresistible urges to send text-messages or make telephone calls. During periods of separation, the threat of infidelity can easily turn a soft-focus day-dream through several degrees of menace into nightmare. When this happens, the resonances between OCD and love sickness are highlighted with respect to both quality and content: unwanted and intrusive sexual images can trouble the OCD patient and the lover. A further and somewhat obviously link concerning clinical obsession and love obsessions is the degree to which both are usually very focused and absorbing. A single idea, person, or image may occupy awareness to the exclusion of everything else.

Depression

• A variant of melancholy
• Sighing
• Lachrymose
• Listless
• Diminished interest or pleasure in activities
• Loss of appetite
• Insomnia
• Fatigue
• Diminished ability to concentrate
• Suicide

Exhibiting five out of six symptoms mentioned above sustained for a mere two weeks is sufficient to merit a diagnosis of major depressive episode. Although love and melancholy are closely related, to construe love solely as a form of depression is clearly inaccurate. Separation and rejection might well provoke the symptoms of depression, but love is much more than yearning, pining and sadness. It is also joy, euphoria and ecstasy. When such positive emotions are felt very intensely, they too can cause problems: for example, overconfidence, boastfulness, recklessness, and a failure to recognise realistic limits. In psychiatry, something very similar occurs in patients suffering from mania, which is associated with increased levels of physical energy and abnormally elevated mood. We now proceed to look at Mania.

Mania and Manic Depression

• Expansive mood
• Inflated self-esteem
• Decreased need for sleep
• A pressure to talk
• Racing thoughts
• Distractibility
• Increased activity (particularly sexual)
• A general disregard for the consequences of pleasure-seeking (for instance, spending large amounts of money on gifts or dining)

In the first euphoric weeks (or even months) or love the symptoms of mania are clearly evident. Only four of the symptoms mentioned above experienced for one week will be sufficient to meet diagnostic criteria for mania episode. Less than a week of these symptoms would be sufficient to merit the lesser diagnosis of hypomania episode. Clinically, mania tends to alternate with episodes of depression. Thus, when psychiatric patients meet criteria for both mania and depression, they are described as being manic-depressive. This general instability of mood is also one of the most characteristic features of passionate love. When in love, the mind oscillates between two emotional polarities. In many respects, manic depression is perhaps the most accurate psychiatric analogue of love, embracing as it does both extremes of the emotional continuum.


Excessive worry about the future of a relationship resembles generalised anxiety disorder; disturbances of appetite and appearance sensitivity are reminiscent of anorexia nervosa; and feeling as though as life has become 'a dream' suggests phenomena such as derealisation (experiencing the world as unreal) and depersonalisation (experiencing the self as unreal). It is extremely easy, in fact, to show correspondences between the symptoms of love sickness and numerous forms of psychiatric illness.

Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,

At random from the truth vainly express'd.

-Dr. Frank Tallis

-William Shakespeare