Romance isn’t always rosy, sometimes it’s sickening – lovesickness, erotomania and death by heartbreak explained
All you need is love.
- All you need is love.
- It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
- But is love all pink hearts, roses and teddy bears – or is there a darker side?
Pathological Love
- Love can hurt.
- Ian McEwan framed a pathological form of affection, leading to obsession in his 1997 novel “Enduring Love”.
- They appear even in the words of Hippocrates, described as a form of unrequited love.
- The condition has seen a renaissance, over the past three centuries, shifting from unanswered love to sex addiction, to its current standing of delusions of love.
I love Paris in the springtime
- Love, or perceptions of love for material objects or places rather than individuals might also be enough to trigger psychiatric illness.
- Stendhal was not a psychiatrist, but a writer, who found himself overcome by the beauty of Florence when travelling there in 1817.
- For others, unfortunately not – leading to a condition known as Paris Syndrome.
Too many broken hearts in the world
- The term broken heart syndrome applies to a genuine cardiac condition – Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.
- The underlying cause of broken heart syndrome?
- The raised levels of adrenaline have been proposed as an underlying cause of broken heart syndrome – a link between heart and mind – though more research is required to tell for sure.
Dan Baumgardt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.