Scotland needs more sex addiction therapists to tackle a spiraling increase in the number of porn addicts, reports The Daily Record.
Glasgow-based psychosexual therapist Pauline Brown said, “Quite simply, there aren’t enough of us in Scotland to cope with the workload… We’ve already lost a generation to porn—this is now about salvaging the next one.”
Brown said more consumers were seeking help as a result of being hooked on online porn. She said, “I would never see patients with erectile problems under the age of 45 when I was working 25 years ago… Now it’s quite normal for young men, even as young as 19, to be seeking help. They watch porn and everything after that in real life is vanilla sex and so they go chasing a buzz. Quite often, it’s mixed in with other addictions such as alcohol or fantasy-gaming websites.”
Related: Cambridge Study Finds Similarities Between Porn Addict And Drug Addict Brains
“I’ve seen people whose entire sexual experience is linked to the accessibility of porn and two-dimensional images on a screen,” she said.
Escalating Behavior
And for many consumers, over time, their sexual experience accelerates into illicit or even illegal territory to get the same “high.”
“It’s no surprise that [their porn interest] can then escalate into criminality,” the therapist said.
Related: Understanding The Booming Underground Industry Of Child Sexual Exploitation
Charity The Reward Foundation—who give talks to elementary-aged kids about the risks of internet porn—say some have become so desensitized to watching extreme sex that they have been driven to seek out images of child abuse.
According to some reports, since 2009, the number of registered sex offenders in Scotland has risen 45% from 3,637 to 5,295. But the numbers convicted of internet-related offenses more than doubled between 2013 and 2015 alone, from 252 to 527, The Daily Record report says.
A Global Problem
Scotland isn’t alone in its difficulty with tackling this issue. As porn continues to become more and more normalized and accessible in society, many other countries are seeing shortages in resources to help struggling youth and addicted adults.
Children as young as 9-years-old are becoming hooked on online pornography leading to compulsive use, unhealthy relationships, and rising levels of sexual abuse. It is the stark reality of a world with easy access to x-rated material on myriad digital devices and is setting a generation up for serious problems in later life. Experts say New Zealand, in particular, is ill-prepared for treating the rising numbers of boys and girls needing help, and that they need to prepare for a “tsunami” of damaged young people.
Related: Porn Fantasies For Virgins: What Internet Pornography Is Doing To Our Generation
“The human brain doesn’t mature until we are in our mid-20s, so introducing any mood-altering process like porn is damaging and arrests development of the brain—the earlier, the more damaging,” Bridget Wilson, an Auckland-based addictions counselor, told the NZ Herald.
“The No 1 problem is the amount and ease of access kids have to online porn,” said Auckland psychotherapist Kyle MacDonald.
Why This Matters
Technology and the internet have added greatly to the world and our society, while they’ve also provided easier-than-ever accessibility to the most hardcore porn imaginable for viewers 9 years old and younger. It’s more important than ever that conversations are started and continued about what porn does to the brains of viewers, their relationships, and how it affects our society in general.
Related: Parents: If You Don’t Teach Your Kids About Sex, Porn Will
If we leave these issues taboo and undiscussed, our relationships will suffer, and our generation and the generations after us will settle for love’s hollow counterfeit over real-life, healthy connections with people.
Porn offers very short-term thrills at the expense of long-term costs, and in the end, watching just isn’t worth it. It’s time we fight for something real, healthy, and crucial to having a thriving society—it’s time we fight for real love and healthy relationships.
What YOU Can Do
Porn is not natural, normal, or healthy. SHARE this article and take a stand against the rising tide of porn-related issues in our society.
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