Love, the Mental Disorder

In addition to all the wonderful emotions passionate love can cause—euphoria, excitement, contentment—it can also cause intense emotional turmoil. People in love often describe feelings of anxiety, depression, and despair when they are not with their loved ones—even when they are only separated for a relatively short period of time. They tend to spend hours and hours obsessively thinking about their loved ones in much the same way that a person diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, experiences intrusive thoughts.

In the late 1990s, psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti and her colleagues from the University of Pisa in Italy speculated that people who are passionately in love and people who suffer from OCD may have something in common—a decrease in the brain chemical serotonin. Decreased levels of serotonin have long been linked to depression and anxiety disorders such as OCD, and antidepressants such as Prozac work primarily by trying to antidepressants such as Prozac work primarily by trying to increase the body’s serotonin levels.

To test their hypothesis, the research team selected three separate groups of men and women. One group consisted of people who had fallen in love within the past six months but not yet had sex, and who obsessed about their new love for a minimum of four hours a day. A second group comprised people who were diagnosed with OCD and were not receiving medication. The third, “normal” group was made up of people who neither met the criteria for OCD nor were passionately in love. The researchers took blood samples from each of the participants and tested their serotonin levels. Not surprising, the people who were neither love-struck nor diagnosed with OCD had normal levels of serotonin. The people who were diagnosed with OCD had significantly lower levels of serotonin than did this control group. But most shocking was that, like the OCD group, the love-struck group had levels of serotonin about 40 percent lower than the control population.

A year later, the researchers again tested some of the lovesick participants, and sure enough, once their initial intense phase of passionate love had passed, their serotonin levels returned to normal. Fortunately, the depletion was not permanent.

Helen Fisher, a researcher at Rutgers University who has used fMRI imaging to scan the brains of many people in love, also believes that passionate love—or lust as she refers to it— resembles OCD. Fisher believes that it may be possible to “treat” or inhibit this state if the person “in lust” were to take an antidepressant such as Prozac early on, when the feelings begin, antidepressant such as Prozac early on, when the feelings begin, to offset the low levels of serotonin characteristic of OCD. But, she says, once the lust turns into romantic love, it is such a powerful drive that no small Prozac cocktail is likely to stifle it.