Love Sick - Softcover

Tallis, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784755664 ISBN 13: 9781784755669

Publisher: Arrow, 2016

Synopsis

Here, leading clinical psychologist, Dr Frank Tallis, explores our age-old preoccupation with love and in particular romantic love. Love is rarely described as a wholly pleasant experience and Tallis considers our experiences and descriptions of love and why the combinations of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterise what we mean when we speak about falling in love. Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses (irresistible urges to phone or text), superstitious or ritualistic compulsions (she loves me, she loves me not), inability to concentrate - so much so that it affects your work, delusion, (are his eyes really deep pools of oceanic azure?). Exhibiting just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of Major Depressive Episode, according to the recognized medical criteria. Drawing on the writings of poets, philosophers, songwriters, zoologists and scientists Tallis shows how throughout time - and particularly in the West, the metaphor of illness and specifically mental illness has been used to describe the state of being in love. And asks why it is that we continue to search out this kind of love, with the ecstasy seeming to blind us to the agony.

About this title

Review:

"Love, far from being benign and sweet, is, in fact, the closest many of us get to experience mental illness" (Mail on Sunday)

"Funny, fascinating, clever and accomplished. Buy it for someone you're mad for, but it yourself first" (Anna Maxted)

"Lesser mortals will find much to entertain and inform" (The Observer)

"Enlightening" (Daily Express)

From the Publisher:

In the best selling tradition of Women Who Love Too Much and Emotional Intelligence

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1784755664
• ISBN 13: 9781784755669
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336