Mental case...

From Games are for Children...

Love as a mental illness

Earlier today, one of CNN's anchors posted an interesting article on one of the network's blogs. The article in question refers to a study conducted earlier in the decade by one British scientist Dr. Tallis, and now confirmed by a researcher named Lucy Brown. The old research was performed by interviewing people who had fallen in love, while the newer study was conducted by scanning the brains of people who were in love while they looked at pictures of the objects of their affections.

Many people label the results as shocking. In fact, when I searched for blogs that mentioned these studies, almost everyone discounted the study as "psychiatry run amok" or "science intruding upon our everyday lives." I have seen few topics on the Internet where so many people are in agreement. Yet, I still disagree with them all.

See, the studies show that romantic love is almost identical in physical symptoms and in brain response to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

The brain scans showed that people who were madly in love had extremely low levels of serotonin, a chemical that's theorized to contribute to a number of mental illnesses - among them depression and anxiety disorders like OCD. The doctor likened love to OCD because both conditions show a 40% reduction in the amount of available serotonin in the brain. He also compared love to bipolar disorder because love had manic episodes (when the partners were together) and depression (when the partners were apart and obsessed that they weren't together). In fact, love doesn't have any separate "higher part" of the brain: it functions on the same reward system as chocolate.

Dr. Tallis is careful to separate sex from love. And while he does admit that love might be a "good mental illness to have," he states that society "vastly underestimates" the effect of love and romance on world affairs. According to him, a large percentage of decisions made by our leaders may be made under the effect of this unusual mental state.

I urge you to consider carefully exactly what's being said here, and ignore the sensational language used in the articles. Many (probably the majority of) psychologists and so-called experts try to convince people that a romantic relationship is a necessary and a non-optional part of good mental health. They will claim that so-called "confidence" is either a result of or a prerequisite of romance, and the romance should be an important part of, if not the only important part of, life. Let's not kid ourselves - "confidence," in its popular use, is simply a general synonym for good mental health.

I once heard it said that the perception of having few options is defined as poor mental health, and people who are truly healthy are open to many options. I maintain, and now cite scientific evidence, that the most "confident," and thus most mentally healthy people, are those who do not need someone else to survive. While in many cases the result is pleasant, love is still an obsession, whether pleasant or not. The man who is happy being single is in much better shape than the one who hits the clubs twice a week trying to pick up women.

If we constantly search outside ourselves for the next thing to make us happy, there will always be something else that we need. We should be happy with the way things are, and not dwell on how things might be better. Perhaps Eastern culture got it right thousands of years ago. Think on this: we can get happy by playing games to get laid, or we can take drugs like Ecstacy. What makes the former socially acceptable while the latter is illegal? We keep needing more and more of both to satisfy our addiction, and they both act on the same part of the brain.

Becoming a "seduction guru" is an overcompensation for depression, OCD, or social anxiety and does not solve the real underlying problem. Most of these gurus did, in fact, suffer from mental illness in the past. The only true way to solve the problem is to happy about being single. If love happens, that's OK, but it should not be the end goal.

In fact, seeking love might just be a step in the wrong direction.