A broken heart? Take two Tylenol and call me . . .

Anyone who has ever experienced heartache knows that the “ache” is not metaphorical. Hearts and minds can hurt with the intensity of a migraine. Rejection and isolation can break one’s spirits as surely as a nasty fall can splinter a femur. So why don’t we treat psychic pain the same way we treat our bodies’ agonies? This seemed like an obvious question to University of Kentucky psychologist Nathan DeWall, yet when he searched the scientific literature, he could find no attempts to even ask the question. So he did the obvious: He handed out Tylenol to see if the drug might soothe people’s emotional suffering. DeWall and his colleagues ran two studies.