LOVE AS MENTAL ILLNESS

Love has been called "maddening" before, but now a researcher thinks there is a chemical basis for why people fall in love.

Dr. Helen Fisher is an anthropologist. She has been studying the chemical basis that is underlying or causing love between individuals. 

She has discovered that love is not about matters of the heart, but actually about brain chemistry; a chemistry that's so intense, so strong, so focused on bringing people together for the sake of prolonging the species, that it's actually a madness to be in love.

Love is, for the sake of argument, a form of mental illness and probably the only one that society accepts without a stigma attached to it. 

You are judged for being mad, as in the insane form of madness, but you are not judged for being "madly" in love even when close friends question your sanity.

According to Fisher, romantic love has been found in 170 societies.  Each love and how these societies express it are different in their own way, but it's still a love of a romantic nature, and one that starts with infatuation and ends with attachment.

Throughout the entire process there are neurological chemicals hard at work. In the beginning, the serotonin levels act in such a way that resembles OCD  and when it comes to the actual "falling in love" stage of a relationship, it is similar to being high on cocaine.

Brain scans of people in love have found that it is the dopamine branching out from the center of the brain, creating feelings of euphoria, walking on air, floating on cloud nine, and all the rest of it. 

It is also not really a choice; we are at the mercy of the chemicals in our brain.

You can fight it, of course, as one might with any mental illness, but unlike things like depression or anxiety, you can't take a pill to "cure" it, or even make it an easier situation in which to be.

Maybe that is why many people act irrationally, with anger, when a love relationship breaks down.

Why do people sign up for the insanity that love is? 

Because the depression, anxieties and low self esteem from loneliness seems to be a greater burden on people's minds that the possible uplifting, happy feelings associated with the risk and rewards of being in love with another person.

If love is all about chemicals, how can one realize it and resist the effect?

Because it is a species trick to keep the species on track for procreation. Just like some wild animals go into involuntary heat or rut for the attention of mates, human beings are coded in a similar fashion.  However, our brains are more complex and advanced to the point where we can go beyond instinct or natural selection to "convince" ourselves that our love is something more - - - deeper than emotional connection; finding a soulmate. The latter may be just an layer of cultural impressions over the instinctive chemical reaction of human attraction and love.

PROOF

Modern science believes that if one cannot visually find and reproduce the results of an experiment over and over again, then the subject matter does not exist.

Repeatable proof is the standard for scientific study.

But the debate on whether human beings have a spiritual element, a soul, is harder to fathom in the scientific circles. Scientists believe that the "spiritual" connotations of instinct, subconscious, emotional responses, free will, etc. are not a separate being within a person's brain but merely the output of normal human bio-chemical brain activities.

The concepts of love, lust, anger, hate, good, evil have no predetermination or propensity in science, which seeks to find a physical call to mental illness and phobias. Some naturalists believe that human beings survival instincts, which were formed on the deep emotion of fear, were natural selection processes since for a long time man was not the top predator on the planet. As mankind evolved, its larger brain capacity was filled with more knowledge and applied knowledge to increase their survival chances. Knowledge does not equate to divine intervention, according to scientists.

But it is odd that science dismisses the unseen as not being real, when they use formulas, theories and assumptions to confirm the existence of a Higgs-Bosum "the God" particle, an invisible building block in physics.

Spirituals point out to a few studies which state that human beings have a natural spiritual connection to themselves and to the planet. These connections run the gambit of cultures, genetics, environments and history. The idea that ancient man believed that there was something more inside him or her than just flesh and bones had to come from something other than their environment. Many anthropologists believe that ancient man was more "in tune" with their own bodies and mind than modern man, who is overwhelmed with outside information, to have introspective analysis of one's self.

Science states that if you cannot "show me" your conclusion, then it does not exist. Spiritualists state that the premise of the scientific standard does not make the unseen untrue.

A few point to the dead weight studies which physicians have weighed bodies just prior to and just after death. The results have been that the deceased person loses approximately 6 ounces of weight. Now, scientists would counter the argument that that weight loss is the release of a soul as being the muscle tension forces being released, but tension is not the equivalent of actual mass.

People tend to believe what they want to believe about science. Junk science has invaded all elements of the modern academic world, which further clouds the search for the truth. But the truth for many people is that there is a hope that after this life, there would be a continuation into a better one.