In her novel "Excessive Joy Injures The Heart", Elisabeth Harvor examines the themes of compulsive behavior. Claire, a secretary for an allopathic medical doctor seeks help from a variety of alternative healers in the hope of curing her insomnia. Her inner life takes over; she is drawn into the New Age sub-culture in a way that suggests cultish brain-washing. Declan Farrell, her chosen "healer" is a lapsed medical doctor with a penchant for border-line quackery. He seeks to heal the whole person by using a variety of peculiar, yet strangely compelling, techniques that run the gamut from massage to visualisation to primal shrieking. Claire's insomnia never subsides; in fact, her compulsive neurotic thought process is, to some extent, exacerbated as the insomnia becomes a pretext for her visits to Declan and she falls ridiculously and inextricably into an emotional relationship with him that one hesitates to call love as collapsed as it is.