Tag Archives: great-myths

“There's good reason to believe that people can be physically and psychologically addicted to specific substances (such as drugs). The idea that people can be addicted to specific behaviors (such as gambling) is also widely accepted. But can a person be addicted to sex? Tiger Woods is scheduled to break his months-long silence about the sex scandal that has plagued the world's most famous athlete. It's not clear how he will explain himself, though according to some reports Woods has been attending a private rehabilitation clinic in Mississippi that treats addictions — including sex addiction. If Woods claims to be suffering from a sex addiction, he can adopt the role of victim (or sufferer) instead of a perpetrator (or pervert). Some therapists — especially, of course, those who treat sex addictions — defend the diagnosis as valid, but many mental health professionals aren't so sure. For one thing, there are currently no universally agreed-upon tests or criteria that diagnose sex addiction. “Sex addiction is one of those pop psychology diagnoses that has scant scientific support,” Scott Lilienfeld, Associate Professor of Psychology at Emory University and co-author of “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology,” told LiveScience. The problem, Lilienfeld explains, is that the label “sex addiction” involves circular reasoning. “It's not at all clear whether the term explains, rather than merely describes, people's sexual behaviors,” he said. “At this point, it seems to be the latter: when we hear that someone has a 'diagnosis' of sex addiction, we haven't really learned anything new. We've merely applied a label summarizing what we already knew—basically that the person has serious trouble containing his or her sexual impulses.” Many in the psychological field who are skeptical that sex addiction is a disease point to a phenomenon called the “pathologizing the ordinary” — creating a category of mental disorder to redefine socially unacceptable behavior as a disease. The idea is that people have little or no control over diseases (unlike voluntary behaviors) so the patient has less responsibility for his or her actions.” What do you think? http://www.livescience.com/culture/tiger-woods-sex-addiction-100218.html added by: DeliaTheArtist