Porn addictions are like non-celiac gluten sensitivities: lots of people claim to have them but they may not be real.
Porn addiction is not currently a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, as The Daily Beast has reported multiple times. But that hasn’t stopped therapists and rehab centers from using the concept with clients like Josh Duggar who have claimed to suffer from it. And if people genuinely feel addicted to porn, what’s the harm in humoring them?
As it turns out, there could be actual psychological harm associated with buying into the concept of porn addiction.
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A new study in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors has found that perceived addiction to pornography—that is, “feeling addicted to Internet pornography irrespective of actual pornography use”—is associated with forms of psychological distress including depression, anxiety, anger, and stress. Pornography use itself, the authors found, was “relatively unrelated to psychological distress.”In other words, porn addiction may not be real but believing in pornography addiction could be associated with—and may even contribute to—genuine psychological problems.
Lead author Joshua P. Grubbs at Case Western Reserve University has previously shown that “religiosity was robustly predictive of perceived addiction”—another finding that deflates the idea that psychological distress associated with porn use should be treated under an addiction framework. In this new study, Grubbs and his team moved from studying predictors of perceived porn addiction to analyzing its possible effects.
The authors conducted two experiments, both similar in structure. In the first, they asked 713 adult Internet users who reported viewing pornography in the last year to answer questions about their porn use and perceived addiction. These porn users also completed several standard psychological surveys used to measure levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and anger. In the second study, they analyzed the responses of 106 U.S. undergraduate students who completed this same set of tests twice, a year apart to test for longitudinal associations.
As controls, Grubbs and team also asked all of their subjects to complete surveys related to neuroticism and socially desirable responding, or the tendency to avoid self-reporting unflattering information.
Even after correcting for these variables, the authors found small but significant associations between psychological distress and perceived addiction to porn in both experiments. All four forms of psychological distress they measured—depression, anxiety, anger, stress—were linked to perceived porn addiction. These small associations were also “largely independent” of actual levels of pornography use.
“Collectively, these findings point to the robustness of the link between perceived addiction and aggregate psychological distress, and imply that links between use and distress are likely accomplished through perceived addiction,” the authors write.
The authors are aware that “many individuals feel addicted to pornography” and they further clarify that it is not safe to say that, “pornography use is never an issue of clinical concern.” But the consistency and replicability of their findings, they argue, should shift clinicians’ focus from targeting pornography use itself—as several treatment centers do—to exploring how their patients feel about pornography.
“[A]lthough concerns about links between pornography use and psychological distress may be warranted, these concerns would be better focused on individuals’ attitudes toward their own use, rather than on the use itself,” they write in a section on the implications of their study.
The authors also suggest that some of the psychological distress reported by many self-declared porn addicts may result not from viewing pornography but from believing that they are addicted to it. In fact, they note, perceived porn addiction “may impact well-being more than the use of pornography itself.”
“[T]hese findings strongly underscore the claim that perceived addiction to Internet pornography likely contributes to the experience of psychological distress for some individuals,” the authors conclude.
Grubbs’ team would like to see future research conducted on perceived porn addiction in clinical settings and with larger samples. But as it stands, the study is a warning: Porn addiction isn’t just a scientifically unproven concept—it may also be a dangerous one that does more harm than it does good.
