Sex Addiction Essay

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Sex addiction is rapidly becoming recognized as a major social problem with similarities being drawn to drug addiction. Nevertheless, there is controversy surrounding the classification of sex addiction as a real addiction due to the lack of peer reviewed evidence in establishing the cause and pathogenesis of the disorder (Kafka, 2010).
A proposed criteria for sexual addiction by Kafka (2010) for DSM-5 by the name hyper sexuality contends that to be diagnosed the patients need to demonstrate following features: time consumed interferes with other non-sexual important activities, repetitively engaging in sexual fantasies and urges in response to dysphonic mood states or stressful life events and unsuccessful attempt to control behavior. Correspondingly, …show more content…

98% of cases of sex addicts reported withdrawal symptoms such as depression, anxiety and guilt with reduced sexual activity, 92% of cases had escalation of sexual activity with time, and 94% increased time seeking potential partners and recovering from sexual activity. Sexual addiction, alike drug addiction also appear to have a craving state prior to sexual activity (Garcia and Thibaut, …show more content…

(2014) discovered that brain activity in sex addiction mirrors that of drug addiction. Excessive pornography is identified as a key feature of sex addiction thus this study used pornography to trigger brain activity in 19 male patients affected by sex addiction and compared them to healthy males using an fMRI. The researchers found that the ventral striatum, dorsal anterior cingulate and amygdala were activated in sex addicted males during experiment compared to the healthy males and that they also had greater interaction between these areas when viewing pornography in comparison to sports videos, these are also regions that are activated in drug addicts when shown drug stimuli. The males affected by sex addiction also showed a higher level of desire but did not rate pornography higher on liking scores. This behaviors also mirrors those found in drug addicts where they seek the drugs because they want it rather than enjoy it called incentive

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