Sexual addiction is generally regarded in one of two ways—the first theory is that it is addiction, like that of drugs or alcohol, where a state of euphoria or a “high” is experienced; the other is that it is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder. However it is defined, sex addiction is considered a progressive illness, meaning that the addictive behavior intensifies the longer it goes untreated. Experts believe an estimated three to six percent of Americans are battling some form of sexual compulsion.

Signs and symptoms of a sexual addict may start innocently enough with excessive masturbation, obsessive use of pornography, or partaking in sex phone services. As the disorder develops, the severity of the symptoms increases. Addicts may compulsively date, engage in unsafe sex, and may have multiple or extra-marital affairs. These acts may not only harm the individual’s health, but can negatively impact their relationships with loved ones.

In the most severe cases, a sex addict will engage in illegal acts such as voyeurism, prostitution, molestation, or even rape. Although not all sex addicts become sex offenders and vice versa, it is estimated that 55 percent of convicted sex offenders have a sexual addiction. Interestingly, a person with sexual addiction generally doesn’t receive pleasure or satisfaction from the sexual act. Instead, they often use sex as an escape from other problems such as stress, depression, or anxiety. Many sex addicts have experienced some form of sexual or verbal abuse in their lives that has contributed to their compulsion.

Even though research on sexual addiction is growing, there are skeptics who claim the condition is not a “real” addiction. Many critics believe sexual compulsion is a narcissistic act and a byproduct of society—nothing more. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has yet to include the diagnosis in its compendium of mental disorders although it does include a miscellaneous diagnosis for sexual disorders.

Treatment for sexual addiction may prove tricky at first because many individuals with this disorder feel embarrassed and shameful, making it difficult for them to acknowledge that they have a problem. Once an individual admits they have an addiction, their recovery follows a similar plan to those of other addictive and behavioral treatments. Patients are encouraged to become involved in group therapy, a 12-step program, and one-on-one therapy sessions with a psychologist or psychiatrist. Medication may also be prescribed. The goal behind the therapy is for the patient to learn how to control their compulsive behavior while maintaining a healthy sexual lifestyle.

Overcoming any type of addiction is highly challenging and sexual addiction is no exception. Under the guidance of a physician or clinical therapist and by having the willingness to change, any individual dealing with this addiction can be treated.

As addressed in a recent Zee News article, for most people with sexual addiction, the behavior is not actually about the sex itself – but rather the way the behavior allows them to escape emotional pain or helps them escape an inability to form close personal bonds with others.

As a result of misconceptions about sexual addiction or feelings of shame, many people may not look for help from experts and treatment professionals. As the condition progresses, the person will need more intense forms of the behavior to get the same "rush" and remain powerless over their urges, despite the consequences.

Like other addictions, sexual addiction is linked with a person’s inability to experience and cope with negative emotions. Similar to people who abuse drugs or alcohol, a person may abuse sexual activity, masturbation, pornography or other sexual outlets to escape stressful emotions. The sexual activity may bring a temporary sense of control over these feelings, but in reality, each behavior associated with the addiction only worsens feelings of shame, guilt and isolation.

For people with sexual addiction, sexual behaviors may bring a sense of release or a short-term high, but the consequences are devastating to their spouse, children and careers. Research involving the causes and treatments for sexual addiction is rapidly increasing across the globe, and hypersexuality is under consideration for formal inclusion in the next version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

As stated in the Zee News article and many professional sources, people living with sexual addiction are living with deep levels of pain and need the help of experts to reach recovery.

Worth told Metro UK that he has been kicked off of Facebook four times. He now says he’s back on Facebook, posing as a woman named Carol Peters, with a photo of model Coralie Robinson. He told Metro that he hopes this tactic will help him attract more women.

Worth also claims to have been removed from dating sites PlentyofFish.com, DatingDirect.com, and Match.com. He says he has about three to four dates per week and collects undergarments as “trophies.”

Worth told BBC News in 2004 that DatingDirect.com removed him because women complained that he was only interested in sex, not commitment. At the time he told the BBC he would keep using dating sites until he’s 80.

Sources: Huffington Post, Catharine Smith, Clive Worth Claims He Was Booted Off Facebook for Bedding Women, July 20, 2010

Fox Chattanooga, Man Claims Facebook Banned Him for Sleeping with 300 Women, July 21, 2010

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disorder that affects the central nervous system and is characterized by tremors and impaired motor skills, speech, and physical movement caused by a deficiency of dopamine in the motor cortex. There currently is no cure for the disease first identified in 1817 by English apothecary James Parkinson, but symptoms can improve with surgery or medications. Dopa-decarboxylase inhibitors are considered the ‘gold standard’ of medications in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease yet has the potential to cause problems of the liver, so dopamine receptor agonists are more commonly used for treatment. While both types of medications are prone to causing side effects, the latter has been linked with causing risk-taking behavior and impulse-control disorders such as problem gambling, sex addiction, and overeating. Pergolide, the second drug involved in the Australian lawsuit, was withdrawn from the U.S. market in 2007 following several reports of heart valves damage caused by the medication in Parkinson’s disease patients.

The Federal Court in Melbourne will hear claims from several of the individuals involved in the lawsuit on Friday, June 11. Some claimants will describe to the court how the prescription medications caused them to experience increasingly progressive gambling addictions and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars due to their problem gambling. Others relate how the medications induced compulsive sexual behavior that led to such sex addictions as pornography addiction. Their addictions, the claimants state, shattered their home lives by destroying trust, safety, and wellbeing. The individuals were prescribed the medications from 1997 to 2009, and allege that their addiction disorders ceased after quitting their medications at the end of this time frame. Both Cabaser and Permax are typically prescribed to individuals under the age of 65 who are suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

The Melbourne law firm representing the claimants will claim that the two pharmaceutical companies breached their provision of care and safety to consumers by (1) failing to properly research the possible side effects of the drugs, (2) failing to provide proper warning about the increased risks of compulsive disorders, and (3) failing to withdraw the drugs from the market after becoming aware of these increased risks.

A recent study published in the May 2010 issue of the Archives in Neurology journal researched 3,090 patients prescribed dopamine receptor agonists for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, and found them to be 2 to 3.5 times more susceptible to impulse-control disorders. Around 13.6% of participants exhibited impulse-control symptoms, of which 5.7% engaged in compulsive shopping, 5% engaged in problem gambling, 4.3% engaged in overeating, and 3.5% engaged in compulsive sexual activity. Additionally, 3.9% had comorbid impulse-control disorders. 

The study concludes that additional research to improve prevention and treatment methods is needed. Dopamine receptor agonists are currently considered effective and preferred methods of treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Health officials are aware of the drugs’ potential to cause impulse-control behaviors, but patients may not recognize symptoms right away since they develop overtime. If patients are experiencing noticeable side effects from their medications, they should immediately consult their doctor. The current claim in Australia parallels other cases against Parkinson’s disease prescriptions that have passed in the United States, Britain, and Canada.

"We still have Stone-Age brains inside contemporarily clothed bodies," says Barrett, author of the new book Supernormal Stimuli. "So we can’t really trust our instincts; we need to trust our intellects."

Misty Harris of Canwest News Service writes in the Edmonton Journal that the problem, of course, is that most of us don’t. And according to Barrett’s studies, it’s because we’re governed by the same knee-jerk behavior as so-called "dumb animals."

Just as a songbird has been shown to prefer fake eggs over its own real ones, simply because the phonies offer an exaggerated version of reality—brighter colors, embellished markings, larger in size—so, too, are humans duped by their own instincts.

"When we see animals trying to mate with a little cardboard cylinder just because it has the right stripes on the side, it looks really silly to us," says Barrett. "But magazine pornography isn’t any less unrealistic a depiction of a real woman."

Because most big genetic changes take 10,000 years or more to pass, she says humans are still coded to respond to their environment in very primitive ways. Once-scarce fat, salt and sugar, for instance, is still pursued today, to the point of excess, despite the fact it’s become widely available.

"Our genes haven’t had time to stop craving those things and start craving green, leafy vegetables, which were around us all the time on the Savannah and didn’t need to be prioritized," says Barrett.

Our social instincts are as easily fooled—to our detriment—by TV’s exaggerated versions of things we naturally seek out.

"We have very attractive actors smiling at us, and laugh tracks playing, and funny quips coming faster than they ever could in real life," says Barrett. "All the things that are meant to pull us into a social interaction but, in fact, are pulling us toward a television set."

Even our ability to detect threats is affected, with Barrett noting people are likelier to gasp at a horror movie or picture of a giant gorilla than news of global warming, which wasn’t an obvious danger to our ancestors.

Because evolution won’t ever catch up to our changing times, she says the best we can do is to recognize what’s happening and try to behave logically.

"We have the tools to handle this, with our superior intellect and brain power," says Barrett. "The problem is that we act reflexively most of the time."

Elizabeth Cohen of CNN writes that Jack Rogers (that’s not his real name) knows a little something about body count because he has one of his own: In the first 20 years of his marriage, he slept with some 50 women. Roger says he views Woods as a sex addict, not just someone looking for a good time.

The 49-year-old Rogers, who works in the high-tech industry in Washington and has two children, says his whole life was geared around how he would have his next orgasm, in the same way a methamphetamine addict is constantly trying to find his next drug hit.

Between women and pornography, he was having three to five orgasms a day, he says. "As soon as I was done with one I was thinking about how I was going to get the next one. Sex was controlling my life, and I was miserable."

Rogers says his addiction began at age 16. "I would have sex for hours and hours at a time, and then go look at pornography," he remembers. "Sex was my all-consuming endpoint."

While some young men might brag about their sexual conquests, Rogers was the opposite. He kept his sex life a secret, seeking out girls who didn’t attend his high school. He says no one suspected.

"I was elected all-school president," he says. "I was well thought of. I earned a full scholarship to the University of Washington. If you’d met me, you’d think, ‘Wow, I want to give that kid a scholarship.’ "

He continued to be obsessed with sex in college. "The day Mount Saint Helens blew up, everyone was talking about it. But I didn’t even know it happened because I was having sex all that day," he remembers.

He was never faithful to a girlfriend, and although he married at age 25, he was never at any point faithful to his wife. "I was having affairs while we were engaged," he says.

His quest for sex started at 4 in the morning, when he would wake up to get in touch with the women he was seeing on the East Coast. The rest of the day was spent mapping out his sexual activities. Some of the women he had sex with were colleagues. Others were prostitutes. Some were women he met by chance.

"I could meet a woman on the elevator and be having sex in her apartment two days later," he says. "I would just get a feeling, from the amount of eye contact or the type of eye contact, that a person would be open to the idea."
He says he usually had two or three affairs going on at one time, but didn’t actually derive pleasure from them. "I wanted to stop and I couldn’t," he says. "I was miserable. It was a horrible way to live."

Jay Parker, a dependency counselor who runs a program for sex addicts in Redmond, Washington, called "No More Secrets," says an intense interest in sex doesn’t mean someone is a sex addict.

"It’s like with alcohol—everyone who gets a DUI isn’t an alcoholic," he says. "There are people who have errors in judgment—they’re not addicts."

According to the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health, an estimated 3 to 5 percent of Americans could fall in the category of having an addiction to sex.

However, it’s important to note that the official handbook of psychiatric diagnoses, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, doesn’t include a diagnosis for sexual addiction. Some therapists, like Craig Fabrikant, a clinical psychologist at the Hackensack University Medical Center, doubts such a thing even exists.

"I think it’s more of a habit than an addiction," he says. "I would classify it as OCD–more of an obsession or compulsion than an addiction."

But professional arguments aside, Fabrikant agrees that people like Rogers who are miserable or dysfunctional because their sex lives are out of control need professional help–and that the first step is to recognize when they have a problem.

Click here to see checklists devised by the Sexual Recovery Institute and the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health to help you determine whether you have a sexual addiction. If you answer yes to a high number of questions on any checklist, you may have a problem.

Here are some general ways to know you might have crossed the line from healthy sexual interest to sexual addiction or compulsion:

1. You lie
For Parker, the sex addiction counselor, this is the No. 1 way you know you’ve crossed the line: when you make up stories to get sex. "If you lie with women to get them to have sex with you, you’re a predator and an addict," he says.

2. Sex consumes you
If your interest in sex runs your life, you have a problem, says Robert Weiss, a social worker and founder of the Sexual Recovery Institute. He says addicts "are always preoccupied with hitting on someone, or picking someone up, or getting home to look at porn before their spouse comes home."

3. You’re "divorced, dead, fired, or arrested"
If you continue your sexual activities even under threat of being "divorced, dead, fired or arrested," you’re an addict, Parker says. "They ignore the consequences," Weiss adds. "They say, ‘I could really screw up myself here, but I’m going to continue to do it.’"

4. You have an intense interest in pornography
"The pornography piece of this cannot be overstated," Parker says. "Show me a guy who’s having sex with three women in one week, and I promise you he has a relationship with pornography."

5. You want to stop and you can’t
Sexual addiction is defined by a loss of control, Weiss says. "I was totally out of control. I tried to stop and I couldn’t," Rogers says.

Five years ago, when the misery got to be too much, Rogers confessed his addiction to his wife and checked himself into an inpatient treatment program for a month, which included not having orgasms alone or with anyone else. After leaving the treatment center, he continued on outpatient treatment, and has not cheated on his wife again.

In treatment, Rogers was not allowed to engage in any type of sexual activity or look at pornography. He also did what he called "psychodrama," looking at situations from his past that might have led to his addiction, including being sexually abused repeatedly at age 7 by an older boy in his neighborhood. In other sessions, counselors helped him understand the effect he’d had on his wife and children, the women he’d slept with, and their families.

His wife joined him for two days at the program. He read her his "disclosure letter" describing his sexual activities over the past 20 years.

"She knew about the pornography and masturbation, but she didn’t know about the affairs or the prostitutes," he says. "So it was very difficult to her to receive this information, just in terms of the sheer numbers of women."

In the last week of treatment, he and his doctors mapped out what his life would look like back home after recovery. He sees a counselor and goes to a 12-step recovery program. "In my first 365 days after treatment, I went to 523 meetings," he says.

Early on in his recovery he did sometimes look at Internet pornography, but a software program he installed on his computer alerted his wife and sponsor in his support group, and he stopped looking at porn.

Gradually, Rogers says, he learned how to have a healthy sex life with his wife. "That’s what we aim for," Parker says. "We’re not trying to turn someone into a monk. He needs to learn how to have sex like a gentleman."

1. Have you ever thought you needed help for your sexual thinking or behavior?

2. Have you ever thought that you’d be better off if you didn’t keep “giving in”?

3. Have you ever thought that sex or stimuli are controlling you?

4. Have you ever tried to stop or limit doing what you felt was wrong in your sexual behavior?

5. Do you resort to sex to escape, relieve anxiety, or because you can’t cope?

6. Do you feel guilt, remorse, or depression afterward?

7. Has your pursuit of sex become more compulsive?

8. Does your pursuit of sex interfere with relations with your spouse?

9. Do you have to resort to images or memories during sex?

10. Does an irresistible impulse arise when the other party makes the overtures or sex is offered?

11. Do you keep going from one relationship or lover to another?

12. Do you feel the “right relationship” would help you stop lusting, masturbating, or being so promiscuous?

13. Do you have a destructive need (a desperate sexual or emotional need) for someone?

14. Does pursuit of sex make you careless for yourself or the welfare of your family or others?

15. Has your effectiveness or concentration decreased as sex has become more compulsive?

16. Do you lose time from work because of sex?

17. Do you turn to a lower environment when pursuing sex?

18. Do you want to get away from your sex partner as soon as possible after the act?

19. Although your spouse is sexually compatible, do you still masturbate or have sex with others?

20. Have you ever been arrested for a sex-related offense?

Varone, a drummer and recovering cocaine addict, tells the story of a watching a 15-year-old girl from his room with binoculars. She would keep her window open, he says, and "explore her body." He explains that she must have known that he was watching her, and that although he hasn’t seen her in 20 to 30 years, he would “go nuts” if he saw her again.

Jill asks if he has engaged in any other types of voyeuristic activity as an adult, and Varone said yes. Jill explains that the voyeuristic activity he is describing is akin to Level II offender behavior: There are unknown victims, but victims regardless. They are participating "unknowingly."

Varone says he knows it’s not right, and Jill explains that it is important for him to understand that his addiction has led him here.

Varone also recalls a woman he used to see in Miami, when he was heavily into drugs. She lived in a building that was parallel to another building with large windows, and the buildings were about 100 feet across from one another. The "idea" of the building was that people would have sex with the windows open, and everyone watches each other–like watching TV. They would do their "show" along with a great deal of cocaine, and watch others have "mind-blowing sex."

When Varone, who claims to have been a geek in high school, first began touring, he suddenly found himself pursued by women, and a whole new world opened up for him. He estimates that he has slept with over 3,000 women, and said his sex addiction escalated when his mother died 11 years ago. He desperately wants to have a committed, caring relationship, but says that he prefers dating multiple women and feels that he would become bored with just one person.

On the Oprah Winfrey show, Dr. Drew defined sex addiction as an intimacy disorder, explaining that people who are addicted to sex may be afraid of or unfamiliar with intimacy, so they substitute sex for real human closeness.

"Sexuality is something that should make you feel good about yourself," Dr. Drew said. "[When you're a sex addict], you’ve lost control of your sexuality." He went on to explain that people who experience negative consequences from their addiction but continue the behavior are considered addicts. "The biggest issue is consequences," he said. "Work, school, finances, relationships, health, legal status…those areas of your life are being threatened."

Dr. Drew told Oprah that 80 to 90 percent of sex addicts suffered trauma as children. "If you have a history of trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in childhood, you want to look very carefully at this behavior," he said.

These terrorizing experiences can influence who you’re drawn to as an adult. "The people and places that cause terror in childhood cause attraction in adulthood," he said. "We end up being repetitively attracted to the same kind of person that obliges us by acting out the same behavior over again."

On “Sex Rehab,” Dr. Drew and a team of addiction specialists work with self-confessed sex addicts to help them overcome their addiction. On the first day, the participants are told that they can have no porn or sex toys, and that they can’t engage in touching, masturbation, or sex.

Amber Smith, a former Sports Illustrated swimwear model, told Oprah that she came to Dr. Drew to get help with her unhealthy obsession with men. After recovering from a drug addiction, Smith said she became intent on meeting men. "I wake up every day, and I go boy hunting to get a hit of the guy," she said. "I feel like I’m falling apart. This is a thousand times more fearful than drug rehab."

Dr. Drew said Amber struggles with another form of sex addiction—love addiction. "In love addiction that experience of: ‘Oh my God, I’m in love…I feel whole, and I feel like I’ve known this person forever.’ That is a feeling that you have to have all the time," he said. "You become addicted to it."

According to Dr. Drew, women often start out as love addicts and over time develop into sex addicts. Amber traces her problems back to her childhood. Her father left home when she was 3 years old, and as an adult, she says she became obsessed with men who look just like him. Amber said her obsessions aren’t fatal attractions, but she becomes severely depressed when she doesn’t see these men.

Amber left rehab six months ago, but says that even though she has the tools she needs to overcome her cycle, it’s very hard for her to stop.

Rock drummer Phil Varone also appeared to talk with Dr. Drew and Oprah, explaining that unlike most sex addicts, he had a happy childhood and supportive parents. As an adult, he found himself incapable of holding on to a relationship. "I just can’t have a relationship because I’m so addicted to a woman’s body," he said. "I have to have them.”

Phil estimates that he’s had sex with more than 3,000 women, and yet he’s afraid of dying alone. "I refer to my alter ego as Hans because he was the rock star. He was the guy who came into the room, you know, pointed a finger and got any woman he wanted," he said. "Phil went to the hotel room alone and just cried on a bed."

After completing Dr. Drew’s rehab program six months ago, Phil was very scared and confused, but now he’s starting to care about someone other than himself. "I’m really even more sorry for my old relationships," he said. "The ones that I really hurt are the ones that I truly feel bad about."

Jennie Ketcham, another patient of Dr. Drew’s, is a former porn star who went by the name Penny Flame. She said she had no interest in intimacy—just in sex. She opened up to Dr. Drew that she suffered a traumatic childhood, losing her virginity at age 12 and having sex with boys in middle school.

"It made me feel powerful over the boys. But, I mean, it totally backfired," she said. "The whole middle school found out that I had a new game to play, and they’d sing songs at lunch. They’d sing, ’1, 2, 3, 4, Jennie Ketcham is a whore.’”

Since leaving rehab, Jennie has abstained from drinking, sex, and pornography. “Rehab really shattered this facade that I’ve been putting on," she said. "Once those pieces were strewn across the rehab floor, the work that I’ve done in picking them up and putting them back together has made me feel a lot less like a monster…but there are certainly days."

Jennie said she needs to get to know herself again before pursuing an intimate relationship with another person. "I haven’t had one up to this point," she said.

Oprah and Dr. Drew also talked to a married couple who struggled with sex addiction. After being married for four years, Elaine discovered that her husband, Jonathan, was secretly addicted to porn, which led him to sex chat rooms and sex with prostitutes.

During this time, Jonathan said he hid his addiction out of shame, and though he felt a release when he had sex, he didn’t enjoy these extramarital relationships. "There’s the thrill of sex, but it’s just so filled with shame and secrecy," he said. "It also brought such feelings of guilt."

The couple separated when Elaine first found out about Jonathan’s addiction, but they have been back together for ten years. "We always ask people to kind of take a breathing period. There may need to be a separation for a period of time," Jonathan said. "We have found that our intimacy in our relationship and our connection is vastly better than we ever imagined it could be…There is hope for change."

Dr. Drew said a marriage plagued by sex addiction can survive if both partners are committed to the recovery process. "It can’t be a one-way street," he said.

"We first have them do a timeline of their life and talk about all the major events and traumas," Dr. Drew said. "We’re jumping in deeply into the feelings and these things that they’ve been detached from and avoiding many times their whole lives."

Dr. Drew said this makes sex addiction the most difficult and painful to treat, and for some, recovery can take three to five years.

"It is a relationship with the self that is flawed. Parts of the self get literally walled off from them. They can’t love them. They can’t even access them."
 

"We had about 80 persons in Pocatello, about double that in Idaho Falls, triple that here in the Rexburg location. People are understanding (that) this is needing to be discussed in an appropriate way," said Craig Kobia, an event organizer.

State Sen. Brent Hill read some alarming statistics: There are 420 million Web pages of porn, and most people first see pornography at age 11. Senator Hill also spoke about his visit to jail, where he asked inmates about what youth need to do to stay out of prison.

"Number 1, stay away from drugs. Number 2, stay away from alcohol. And number 3, stay away from pornography," said Hill.

KIDK’s Steven Pope asked Dr. Donald Hilton, keynote speaker and brain surgeon, about his feelings on pornography.

"It’s a true addiction. In the past we tended to look at porn as a personal behavioral issue. Science now is equalizing what we call natural addictions to gambling, overeating leading to obesity, and sexual addictions as pornography. Really science is now equating that to drug addictions in terms of changes we’re seeing in the brain," said Dr. Hilton.

"I think what that means for us in terms of treatment, is that we must accord pornography addiction the same respect and treatment that we’d would any true drug addiction," said Dr. Hilton.