Love Sick

From the halls of the Kangaroo Court weblog

Dr. Frank Tallis, a practicing clinical psychologist in Britain, wants us to take the mentaphor of "love sickness" seriously. He wants it to be considered a mental illness and the people suffering from this terrible malady to be "treated" for their sickness.

Psychiatry is a creation of the modern era, as the practice of mad doctoring is only a few hundred years old. But this fact never stops believers in the psychiatric religion like Tallis from claiming that their beliefs were also held by the ancients. Yes, the ancient Greeks believed that love is a mental illness and they aggressively diagnosed and treated it. To check Tallis' argument out, all you have to do is take in some ancient Greek literature, like the Illiad. There you'll read about characters in love, like Paris, who are quickly carted off by the men in white coats and taken to the local psychiatric hospital once their illness has been discovered.

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Tallis wants all romantic love to be classified as a mental illness so that the last obstacle in the way of his crusade to save people from the plague of love sickness can be removed. Tallis understands that if the people he sees as mentally ill continue to be seen as normal, then his crusade to agressively diagnose and treat them with government sponsored psychiatric violence won't get anywhere. This raises "substantial ethical issues" for Tallis.

Of course, maybe Tallis is suffering from some malady himself. Maybe he wasn't loved enough when he was a child. Maybe he only needs enough electro shock to feel loved. Who knows?