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Too high for love: lost your drive? ...
When the physicians come to me,/ My heart rejects their remedies;/ The magicians are quite helpless,/ My sickness is not discerned./ To tell me “She is here” would revive me!

If this Ancient Egyptian poem is any guide, lovesickness has been with us for more than 3,000 years. But psychiatrists may be unintentionally “curing” us of that experience and other aspects of romantic love with modern antidepressant medications.

So argue the anthropologist Helen Fisher, and the psychiatrist James Thomson Jr. Their case, sketched out in Fisher’s recent book, Why We Love (Henry Holt, £13.22), centres on how certain antidepressants could be blocking chemical pathways in the brain that were paved by evolution to help us meet and keep mates. ...