In his book Love Sick, leading clinical psychologist, Dr Frank Tallis, explores our age-old preoccupation with love and in particular romantic love. Love is rarely described as a wholly pleasant experience and Tallis considers our experiences and descriptions of love and why the combinations of pleasure and pain ecstacy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterise what we mean when we speak about falling in love. Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses (irresistable urges to phone or text), superstitious or ritualistic compulsions (she loves me, she loves me not), inability to concentrate - so much so that it affects your work, delusion, (are his eyes really deep pools of oceanci azure?). Exhibiting just five or six of these symtoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of Major Depressive Episode, according to the recognised medical criteria. Drawing on the writings of poets, philosophers, songwriters, zoologists and scientists Tallis shows how throughout time - and particularly in the West, the metaphor of illness and specifically mental illness has been used to describe the state of being in love