Love Sick

Love as a Mental Illness

Contributors

By Frank Tallis

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$21.99

Price

$28.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

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Trade Paperback $21.99 $28.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around January 3, 2005. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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.

Genre:

On Sale
Jan 3, 2005
Page Count
332 pages
ISBN-13
9781560256472

Frank Tallis

About the Author

Frank Tallis is a clinical psychologist and the author of over fifteen books, including The Incurable Romantic: And Other Tales of Madness and Desire. He previously taught clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King’s College, London. He lives in London and Bonnieux, France.

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