Posts tagged Human sexual behavior

This week’s segment of CBS Doc Dot Com sexual addiction, a subject about which I learned absolutely nothing in medical school and have not learned much more since. In researching the topic over the past week, I began to understand that it is extremely controversial, with experts not even agreeing about whether sexual addiction is a true addiction.

When most people hear the term, they usually think they know what’s meant by sexual addiction. They may think of someone (usually a man) who has an incessant need to make sexual conquests, sometimes despite his own best intentions. But even back in the days when Sam Malone got this diagnosis on the old TV show “Cheers,” it was clear that a real definition was lacking. In 1998, two researchers published an article entitled “Sexual addiction: many conceptions, minimal data.” As Erick Janssen, Ph.D., Director of Education & Research Training at The Kinsey Institute, explained to me in an email: “We do not have a generally accepted definition of ’sex addiction.’ It was originally approached as involving some kind of ‘inability to adequately control sexual behavior,’ but this is, as you can tell, not a very objective definition. According to some, sexual addiction seems in the eye of the beholder, or in the eyes of his or her therapist.”

For one side of the definitional argument, I spoke to addictions treatment specialist Mavis Humes Baird, who is convinced that sexual addiction is a true disorder because people are in the throws of an impulse they can’t control, that there are underlying changes in the brain that cannot be addressed by psychotherapy alone. She told me, “for example, if one of the partners in a couple is having affairs and they’re not a sex addict, marriage counseling or family therapy is very effective. But if they’re a sex addict, all the therapy in the world getting at problems in the relationship won’t touch the addiction. One of the primary referral sources for sex addiction is couples counselors who have been doing attachment work with couples for years with the addiction going on unaffected and sometimes kept secret for all those years. You can’t treat the sex problems between the partners until the addiction is treated. And that’s done by a combination of specific treatment protocols, and 12-step program involvement, and sometimes medication.”

via Dr. Jon LaPook: Sex Addiction: Is It Really an Addiction?.

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