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Wikipedia / Lovesickness

Lovesickness is the mental state brought on by the personal experience of unfulfilled, unconsummated, or unrequited love. Lovesickness is a feature of infatuated love or limerence (being irrationally love stricken or smitten), and included under broad labels of romantic love and passionate love.

This state of longing for an unavailable beloved is characterized by addictive cravings, depression and intrusive thoughts about a love object. Research on the biology of romantic love indicates that the early stage of intense romantic love (also called passionate love) resembles addiction, but academics do not currently agree on how love addiction is defined. Lovesickness is not mentioned in modern medical texts, although historically it was considered a medical entity.

Erotomania has also been included under the heading of lovesickness. Another related term is "obsessive love".

Symptoms

Although lovesickness is no longer recognized as a medical condition, its symptoms nevertheless bear a resemblance to other modern diagnostic entities. According to the clinical psychologist Frank Tallis, lovesickness "still looks like, feels like, and behaves like a mental illness. [...] Clearly, a 'clinically significant' amount of distress and general impairment are an almost inevitable consequence of falling in love."

The four "core symptoms" of falling in love according to Tallis are as follows:

Other symptoms related by Tallis with less diagnostic overlap are:

Insomnia is another consistent symptom.

Because no appropriate diagnosis exists, lovesickness is subject to misdiagnosis, as depression, for example. Tallis has asked whether the condition should be taken more seriously by professionals. According to Tallis, a typical clinician will not receive referrals for lovesickness, despite the intensity of potential consequences. Lovesickness may be the underlying cause of many problems being reported, so proper examination is important. One possible consequence would be suicide of the lovesick individual—hence why it was considered a potentially fatal illness by ancient physicians.

The nature of lovesickness as an illness or pathology is now being compared to addiction by modern authors. Lovesickness has been included under discussion of "love addiction", the proposed diagnosis for love relations involving severe distress or adverse consequences. However, a difficulty exists around defining such a disorder, because love passion normally involves some amount of addictive features. A further concern is the risk of misunderstanding and "overmedicalizing" or stigmatizing such individuals.

History

Love has been described as an illness for as long as it has been written about—as a subject of poetry, but also a comparison the medical profession accepted for over a thousand years. Lovesickness was considered a legitimate diagnosis among doctors from the time of Galen, until around the 18th and 19th centuries.

Galen was a doctor of Greek origin, associated with ancient Rome, during a time when lovesickness began to receive the attention of doctors. Galen was a follower of the Hippocratic system of medicine (humorism), and proposed that the symptoms of lovesickness were attributable to a humoral imbalance caused by the influence of strong passion, rather than divine intervention. Hippocratic writings had also challenged the view that other mental ailments such as epilepsy had supernatural causes.

"Love melancholia" is an almost inevitable result of passionate love according to Hippocratic principles. Physicians of ancient Greece and Rome whose writings survive interpret lovesickness as a depressive illness, characterized by sadness, insomnia, despondency, dejection, physical debility, and blinking. A similarity to depressive melancholia is discussed among these authors; however, rather than having a physical cause like melancholia, lovesickness was viewed as either a kind of psychological disturbance best cured by intercourse, or as an illness, but not caused by an excess of black bile.

Sexual intercourse was often prescribed as a treatment for lovesickness by early Greek and Roman physicians. In one historical case, the Greek physician Erasistratus was called by King Seleucus of Syria to diagnose the illness of his son, Prince Antiochus. Erasistratus observed Antiochus' symptoms when different women entered the room, and upon discovering that Antiochus' illness was in fact his lovesickness for the king's wife Stratonice (Antiochus' young stepmother), Erasistratus recommended to Seleucus that he give up his wife to save his son, believing this would cure him. The king obliged, and later Antiochus and Stratonice were wed.

Remedia Amoris by the Roman poet Ovid has been called the first known treatise on lovesickness. A strong parallel has been recognized between the descriptions and advice given by Ovid, and the modern-day literature on addiction. Lovesickness is presented by Ovid as both a physical malady (with insomnia and withdrawal as symptoms), and also a disease of the will, impairing personal agency. On the subject of his own lovesickness, Ovid laments:

For recovery, Ovid recommends to "keep busy" and avoid any triggers which could reignite the lovesick individual's diminishing passion (comparable to abstinence-based unlearning of the behavior) and to contemplate the defects of the beloved.

In the Middle Ages, unrequited love was considered "a trauma which, for the medieval melancholic, was difficult to relieve." Treatments included light therapy, rest, exposure to nature, and a diet of lamb, lettuce, fish, eggs, and ripe fruit. In the Middle Ages, lovesickness was often explained by an imbalance in the humors. An excess of black bile, the humor correlated with melancholy, was usually considered the cause.

Ancient and classical authors emphasized the physical manifestations of love more so than the psychological. Lovesickness as a diagnosis fell out of popularity among doctors around the 18th and 19th centuries, due to the decline of Hippocratic principles and humorism in medicine. This shift required a new explanation for the symptoms of lovesickness, which instead became attributed to having "too much sensibility" (a term used for emotional sensitivity).

In 1915, Sigmund Freud asked rhetorically, "Isn't what we mean by 'falling in love' a kind of sickness and craziness, an illusion, a blindness to what the loved person is really like?"

Biological research

In the arts

The depressed and physically ill lover is more of a cliché of modern and medieval literature, although it is present in more ancient writings. In ancient literature, frustrated love more often manifested itself in violent and manic behavior rather than love melancholy. In ancient Greece, Euripides' play Medea portrays Medea's descent into "violence and mania" as a result of her lovesickness for Jason; meanwhile, in ancient Rome, Virgil's Dido has a manic reaction to the betrayal of her lover, Aeneas, and commits suicide. Dido's case is especially interesting, as the cause of her lovesickness is attributed to the meddling of the gods Juno and Venus.

William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet portrays the true madness of "love" and the grief that the two young, infatuated lovers feel. When Romeo finds his love dead (or so he believes), with the thought of living without his "true love", the grief and depression overcomes him and he takes his own life. After waking and seeing his dead body, Juliet is overcome with despair and takes her own life.

Gothic metal songs thematize lovesickness from Medieval literary influences. "This emotional and physical distress is a key element of fin'amor that echoes into Gothic metal", according to The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism. "In particular, lovesickness was associated with desires and passions that remained unfulfilled, resulting in symptoms such as sleeplessness, sighing, and loss of appetite, all of which were considered manifestations of the mind's efforts to restrain its passions."

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