Contrary to many statements, researchers from University of California, Los Angeles, don't think sex addiction is a mental disorder.
Sex addiction has been the cause of many broken relationships and disastrous marriages. But can it be regarded as a mental disorder. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, don't think so. According to them, people with such addictions might simply have heightened libidos.
The researchers studied 39 men and 13 women who reportedly had problems controlling their viewing of sexual images. They were asked to look at sexual and non-sexual images while researchers measured their neural responses. Researchers noted that the participants had trouble controlling how often they looked at pornography. The experiment conducted was on similar lines of experiments conducted on drug addicts as they viewed "image cues" of their drugs of choice.
Researchers noted that their brain responses correlated only with the levels of sexual desire among the participants, but not with the severity of their habitual porn viewing.
"If they indeed suffer from hypersexuality, or sexual addiction, their brain response to visual sexual stimuli could be expected to be higher, in much the same way that the brains of cocaine addicts have been shown to react to images of the drug in other studies," a UC press release on the study explained.
Over 12 million Americans suffer from sex addiction and this number has been growing because of easy accessibility to sexual material available on the Internet, cable television and videos. Though the number of people affected by this addiction is staggering, the American Psychiatric Association didn't term it as a disease in their recently updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM-5.
