In an article published in top psychiatry journal JAMA Psychiatry, researchers David Mataix-Cols and Johan Åhlén argue that doctors should be on the lookout for a new diagnosis: obsessional jealousy. The goal, of course, is identifying this illness quickly so that the appropriate treatment can be provided.
This is the latest bid to expand psychiatric diagnoses to include every human experience. Grief was already turned into a medical diagnosis in the latest version of psychiatry’s diagnostic bible: Say your spouse passes away, or your child dies tragically? Well, if you continue to miss them after a year, you now suffer from actual medical illness “prolonged grief disorder,” according to psychiatry.
Grief was suggested as a possible disorder in DSM-5 before making its big official debut in ICD-11 and DSM-5 TR. Jealousy is following the same playbook: DSM-5 already floated obsessional jealousy as a possible “other” OCD-related disorder, so Mataix-Cols and Åhlén’s article is the next step in moving it into the official diagnosis territory.
“The analogy with prolonged grief disorder is instructive,” Mataix-Cols and Åhlén write, about their new jealousy diagnosis. “Grief is universal, but in a minority of people it becomes persistent, debilitating, and qualitatively distinct, warranting recognition as a disorder to facilitate appropriate treatment.” Jealousy is the same, they suggest: “in some people, jealousy becomes excessive, intrusive, persistent, and uncontrollable, undermining rather than protecting intimacy.”
Perhaps the analogy with grief is instructive for another reason, though: people diagnosed with “prolonged grief disorder” actually don’t think they have a disorder, nor do they think the diagnosis is helpful. In a study of those who experienced a recent significant loss, 98% said that their grief was the appropriate, healthy reaction. Of those who met criteria for the “prolonged grief disorder” diagnosis, only 13.4% said they thought the diagnosis could be helpful.
Would jealous people find being called mentally ill helpful? If you are suspicious of your partner’s behavior, would it help your relationship to be diagnosed as “obsessively jealous”? Who gets to decide what is “too jealous”? What if your partner is actually being dishonest? Mataix-Cols and Åhlén don’t bother to address these issues; we are simply meant to assume that an identifiable level of “too jealous” exists and that psychiatrists will easily distinguish a mentally ill jealous person from someone who is rightly suspicious of a dishonest partner—and that jealous people will welcome such a label.
In fact, they add, labeling jealousy as mental illness will help relationships. A man with a jealous girlfriend will now able to obtain “understanding, assistance,” and even unspecified “protection” once he convinces her that she has a psychiatric illness because she’s suspicious of his behavior. Some might be tempted to call this gaslighting; this article presents it as science.
“For partners and significant others, recognition could also be helpful,” Mataix-Cols and Åhlén write, “as it may offer an explanation for distressing experiences in the relationship and support their own need for understanding, assistance, and, for some, even protection.”
And don’t worry about the medicalization of the human experience, Mataix-Cols and Åhlén add. The point is not to sell more prescriptions to people who are jealous, but to ensure they get a different, unspecified “treatment” (which of course, doesn’t exist yet, because jealousy is not yet a diagnosis). According to them, “the notion of a drug for jealousy is implausible.”
That would be more believable if psychiatry wasn’t already promoting drugs for grief based on the hypothesis that missing your loved one is an addiction, just like alcoholism.
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Mataix-Cols, D. & Åhlén, J. (2026). Does Obsessional Jealousy Belong in Psychiatry? JAMA Psychiatry. Published online February 11, 2026. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2025.4735 (Link)
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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.