Love Sickness: Dissect and Discuss
Orwell famously lampooned academic verbiage in Politics and the English Language, a theme of which was that linguistic complexity is an act of obfuscation that has moral and political meanings. In America, we have the habit of validating experiences through the spurious application of medical language; we consider legitimate what can be studied and treated.
So perhaps this Wikipedia article on “love sickness” is an expression of our desire to subordinate pain to reason, although it’s worth noting that Ibn Sena, a Muslim physician in the tenth century, felt that love sickness was a medical problem.
And before I dismiss the whole idea of a dry discourse on the “medical” problems of love, I should also admit that much of the article is quite accurate:
- “People who find the feeling of love too intense may experience “love sickness” with feelings of anxiety, and can have symptoms of mania, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), inflatedself esteem and depression.”
- “According to the author of [a] study, Frank Tallis, “Many people are referred for help who cannot cope with the intensity of love, have been destabilised by falling in love, or suffer on account of their love being unrequited.”“
- “Some of the symptom clusters shared with love sickness include
- mania – abnormally elevated mood, inflated self esteem, extravagant gift giving
- depression – tearfulness, insomnia, loss of concentration
- OCD – preoccupation, constantly checking (e.g. text messages/emails, etc.), and hoarding valueless but superstitiously resonant items
- psychologically created physical symptoms, such as upset stomach, change in appetite, insomnia, dizziness, and confusion.”
So I’ll not mock the champions of a more scientific concept of love sickness; I’m tired of poetry and love songs, anyway. Cheers to the new schema, the new diagrams and models, which indicate I suffer regularly from a disease, one which needs to be respected by my workplace, paid for by my insurer, and hopefully medicated by my friendly pharmaceutical company.
