Sex Addiction Panel Added to ACSOL Conference

A panel regarding sex addiction has been added to ACSOL’s annual conference to be held on October 14 and October 15 in Los Angeles at Southwestern Law School.  The panel will include presentations by marriage and family therapist JoEllen Wiggington, social worker Alex Gittinger and a representative from Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA).

The panel will focus both upon identification of several types of sex addiction as well as treatment opportunities.  The panel is scheduled to be held on Saturday, October 14, at 3:45 p.m.

The cost for the two-day conference, including lunch on both days, is $75.  Scholarships are available upon request.  Please send scholarship requests to info@all4consolaws.org.

To sign up for the conference, please click here.

 

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Who else views this as an important topic to include?
Certainly part of my story.

“On 16 November 2017 the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) published a position against sending sex offenders to sex addiction treatment facilities.[42] Those centers argued that “illegal” behaviors were symptoms of sex addiction, which ATSA challenged they had no scientific evidence to support.”

Prominent research psychologists are very skeptical about “sex addiction” claims. The sex addiction model is not scientifically supported and is known to be freighted with acculturated pop psychology and religious fundamentalist baggage. I don’t think that it should be promoted within our reform movement because it appears to be largely pseudo-science and promoted heavily by churches and religious organizations. As Judith Levine pointed out a number of years ago at either the ACSOL or NARSOL conference (I forget which), it would be a mistake to confuse a sexual attraction – even one that is illegal to act upon – for a “sexual addiction.” In other words, a sexual preference is not a “sexual addiction.” It may have terrible legal consequences to act on your attraction but that doesn’t make it an “addiction.” This has implications for taking a 12-step approach to the treatment of paraphilias.

More from Wikipedia: “As of 2023, sexual addiction is not a clinical diagnosis in either the DSM or ICD medical classifications of diseases and medical disorders. 

In November 2016, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT), the official body for sex and relationship therapy in the United States, issued a position statement on sex addiction declaring that their organization “does not find sufficient empirical evidence to support the classification of sex addiction or porn addiction as a mental health disorder, and does not find the sexual addiction training and treatment methods and educational pedagogies to be adequately informed by accurate human sexuality knowledge. Therefore, it is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling or therapy.”[40]

In 2017, three new USA sexual health organizations found no support for the idea that sex or adult films were addictive in their position statement.[41]
Neuroscientists who are sex researchers state sex is not addictive. Addiction criteria were not met for sexual behaviours: “experimental studies do not support key elements of addiction such as escalation of use, difficulty regulating urges, negative effects, reward deficiency syndrome, withdrawal syndrome with cessation, tolerance, or enhanced late positive potentials.” Аs well as evidence of a key neurobiological feature of addiction is scarce in case of sex.”

I think it’s an important, relevant topic. I don’t have the stats and solid professional references handy to support this claim, but they do exist. I know for a fact that the proliferation of easily available online pornography, with increasingly illegal and violent depictions is creating a growing movement of online porn / sex addiction. Especially for young people, whose brains are not fully formed and not mature enough to fully process, who view increasingly deviant behaviors over and over. The dopamine hits are the reward and as they seek out these images, they get deeper and deeper into illegal images, illegal videos, and illegal chat rooms. It’s not the same as a dirty magazine hidden between the mattress of yesteryear.

It becomes “normal” to a young person and by the time they are of legal age, they are driven to seek it out over and over to get the stimulation and dopamine reward, hence the addiction. And like any compulsive / addictive behavior, it becomes a coping mechanism to deal with life’s difficulties. An escape. I don’t have numbers, but they are large based on the increase of CP possession convictions for young people many of whom have sex addictions and may never have even had sexual contact with a real person.

Once the brain is screwed up, it is very difficult to unscrew it. Not impossible of course, but it’s a battle like other mental disorders, compulsive behaviors, addictions.

Will the Sex Addiction Panel adhere to scientific facts? The term “addiction” implies it won’t. An Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior Panel would be credible, and there’s prescription medicine for that disorder. Will pornography be one of the “addictions” identified in terms of causation despite scientific evidence to the contrary? Does the panel consist of sex-positive activists that support consensual sadomasochism, polyamory, and atheists alike. Was Nina Hartley invited to serve on the panel? It is not too late! Too bad Nancy Friday isn’t available. Will the panel limit their treatment options to non-pseudoscience therapies? It’s easy to hijack the focus and propagate misguided beliefs. Erotica, Mortal Kombat, and Marquis de Sade fiction are not problems and don’t negatively affect anyone at any age. Shame and guilt does, unless you’re raised Catholic… in which case you become a well-disciplined sex-positive activist.

I understand that sex and porn addiction is not currently in the “big book” of mental disorders DSM-5 of the American Psychiatric Association, however, that does not mean it won’t be in the near future. Inclusion of mental disorders and addictions in DSM-5 has been slow, but one of the many interesting shifts in DSM-5 was the reclassification of pathological gambling from the impulse control disorders category to substance addictions (“substance-related and addictive disorders”). The shift effectively recognized (the now re-labeled) “gambling disorder” as the first behavioral addiction.

In addition, Mayo Clinic and other healthcare providers recognize that addictions come in many forms from heroin and alcohol to shopping and  gambling.
Don’t bet on it: Know when sports gambling is more than entertainment
They often are circular with multiple cycles of relapse and remission. Without treatment or engagement in recovery activities, addiction is progressive (quote from Mayo).

I do not doubt there is dispute among psychologists, as there often is when there is a controversial issue, but there is science behind brain center rewards and dopamine release etc. similar to other addictions.

I think it’s awful that there are religious groups pushing their religious agendas and spewing their hate, I am not a proponent of that in the slightest – quite the opposite. And I have not come in contact with these zealots. However, I do know several Cognitive Behavior specialists who understand how sex and porn can take over a person’s life and they offer behavioral treatment and support not based on anything to do with religion. At a minimum, it helps people to understand they are not alone and how to cope with their issues and anxieties.

So call it what you want, but I have seen enough and know enough to call it an addiction, even if others still do not agree with that and even if some religious fanatics are misusing the term for their own hateful agendas.