Treating Sex Addicts

[From article]

“When I first came into treatment, I was so sick I enjoyed being in meetings where I knew I could get men’s attention. I dressed in a push-up bra, massive heels … I even had a vibrator in my bag. Back then I had no boundaries around what was appropriate, but a lot of my recovery came from listening to men and hearing the other side.
“When you see people’s remorse and genuinely wanting to change, you see them as people, not a means to make yourself feel better.”
Tom entered treatment two years ago when his marriage crumbled and he found himself acting out with drugs and prostitutes. But he believes the “addiction” started earlier. “I can remember as a kid, my parents were quite emotionally withdrawn, and so every time I experienced anxiety and fear, I’d alleviate it through some kind of distraction,” he says. “Eventually I discovered sex and masturbation as a primary coping mechanism.
“At school I’d hide magazines and obsess over when I could look at them. The adrenaline of acquiring and hiding pornography was a potent aspect of the addiction because of the possibility of discovery and humiliation.”
[. . .]



“When I first came into treatment, I was so sick I enjoyed being in meetings where I knew I could get men’s attention. I dressed in a push-up bra, massive heels … I even had a vibrator in my bag. Back then I had no boundaries around what was appropriate, but a lot of my recovery came from listening to men and hearing the other side.
“When you see people’s remorse and genuinely wanting to change, you see them as people, not a means to make yourself feel better.”
Tom entered treatment two years ago when his marriage crumbled and he found himself acting out with drugs and prostitutes. But he believes the “addiction” started earlier. “I can remember as a kid, my parents were quite emotionally withdrawn, and so every time I experienced anxiety and fear, I’d alleviate it through some kind of distraction,” he says. “Eventually I discovered sex and masturbation as a primary coping mechanism.
“At school I’d hide magazines and obsess over when I could look at them. The adrenaline of acquiring and hiding pornography was a potent aspect of the addiction because of the possibility of discovery and humiliation.”
As an adult, Tom continued to use sex and porn as a way to alleviate anxiety and depression. “Even though I had an active sex life with my wife, I used prostitutes and erectile dysfunction medication as a kind of ‘peak experience’. I slept with people I was attracted to at the expense of anything else.”
“Once I get into the state of anticipation around a reward, the consequential thinking part of me just switches off. It’s exactly the same sequence of a drug addict or alcoholic who has two beers and goes on to drink for three days. You introduce the substance or trigger for arousal, it switches off your control.”



ADDICTED TO LOVE?
Sex and love addiction manifests in a variety of compulsive behaviour patterns. For some it’s sex and pornography, for others it could play out as emotional anorexia, or an addiction to co-dependent relationships, romantic or fantasy obsession.
[. . .]
For Zoe, it was realising she was engaging in increasingly risky behaviours. “As a result of putting myself in progressively dangerous situations, I’ve been raped, had unprotected sex and got pregnant and had unprotected sex with people I knew had STDs. It’s not only risky sexual behaviour — in one relationship I spent $20,000 on things just because my partner wanted to.”
[. . .]
“The more someone rejected me the more it turned me on, but sleeping with them screwed my self-esteem. I came out of every relationship more damaged and bitter each time. It was a revelation to me that in a healthy relationship you don’t have to chase someone to get them to like you.”
[. . .]
In recovery, each individual develops a set of “bottom line” trigger behaviours that they just won’t do.
“It’s like an alcoholic deciding they won’t hang around in pubs,” says Zoe. “You identify patterns to understand what addiction looks like. My bottom line is ‘no one-night stands’ because the last one-night stand I ended up marrying, and I almost married the second!”
“I also won’t date anyone who is unavailable for a relationship; so someone who is married or lives in another state, for example.”
For Libby, it’s about not feeding the fantasy. “One of the behaviours I needed to stop was constantly checking who was looking at me. I also have to not play music and think about them. Instead, when I start obsessing, I have to call other people in recovery and talk about where my head is at.”
[. . .]



“I’m online dating, so I need a plan. I call someone before and after a date. And I don’t have sex unless I’ve made a decision to do that beforehand.”
Although there are women-only meetings, Zoe says that listening to men’s perspective is invaluable.
“One of the most healing aspects of meetings has been seeing men as human beings, not as objects for my gratification.”

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/three-australian-sex-addicts-reveal-why-they-went-into-treatment/news-story/bf4cbc5e8878ce90f6ee47a7b4002df9

Three Australian sex addicts reveal why they went into treatment
MAY 3, 20167:17AM

*All names have been changed.
Alice Williams is a Melbourne writer and teacher.

Propaganda for Taxpayer Funded Psychiatry

This essay is propaganda promoting more taxpayer funded psychiatric treatment. It is misguided to rely on Treatment Advocacy Center, a lobbyist for the psychiatric industry run by E. Fuller Torrey who promotes treatment not rights of persons with disabilities. Suggesting police should treat violent criminals differently based on a psychiatric diagnosis is irrational. There is no evidence that the diagnosis causes violence and crime. 

When confronted by a violent person who threatens the safety of an officer, or another person, are the police supposed to stop, take cover and wait for a psychiatrist to talk to the suspect while the officer watches and protects the psychiatrist? Are police supposed to force drugs on the suspect? This essay promotes treatment over public safety. It is similar to the arguments of CAIR and extremist liberals who argue that Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants should not be suspected of terrorism, because it is profiling. Rational bias is ignored endangering public safety. Persons with disabilities who commit a crime should be treated the same as persons without disabilities. The initial error is calling police and expecting them to treat children as patients. That is not what police are for. The argument that psychiatric diagnoses are no different than physical illnesses is another element of psychiatric propaganda. 

Psychiatric illnesses have no pathology. They are made up by consensus, not science. Psychiatric illnesses are protected speech and behavior, which psychiatrists do not like or do not understand. Psychiatric industry lobbyists, e.g., NAMI and Treatment Advocacy Center promote false narratives, e.g., that mental illness is a chemical imbalance of the brain. When challenged the American Psychiatric Association was unable to provide evidence of any imbalance or even for a chemical balance of the brain. They promote multi color images of the brain claiming that is mental illness. Soon they will demand compulsory MRIs to force treatment on all people with colorful brain images. 



Psychiatric diagnoses are personal opinion masquerading as science. Psychiatry is a means of social control with no due process protections. This essay promotes using psychiatric diagnoses instead of the constitution and laws for taking freedom and using the legitimate state police power to control human behavior based on psychiatric diagnoses, not law. Curious that after gun violence or police shootings of civilians, liberals blame guns, and demand more gun laws; while conservatives blame psychiatric diagnoses and demand more taxpayer funded treatment. "The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." - H. L. Mencken. "One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them." - Thomas Sowell.



[From article]
Quintonio LeGrier’s father called police after locking himself in a bedroom when his son menaced him with a baseball bat. When the police arrived, LaGrier, a 19-year-old with emotional problems, allegedly charged them with the bat. An officer shot him dead, and accidentally killed a neighbor as well.
The heart-rending case is, tragically, almost routine. Consider two other recent cases. On Dec. 29, Siolosega Velega-Nuufolau of Santa Nella, California, a 50-year-old woman with mental problems, was shot dead when allegedly charging a sheriff’s deputy with a kitchen knife. On Dec. 19, police killed Ruben Jose Herrera, a 26-year-old Los Angeles-area man suffering from bipolar disorder, when he allegedly lunged for an officer’s gun in the hospital.
[. . .]



For all the attention devoted to police-involved shootings and race, mental illness is the more salient issue. A joint report by the Treatment Advocacy Center and National Sheriffs’ Association in 2013 examined cases between 1980 and 2008, and estimated that roughly half involved people with mental illness. A Washington Post analysis of 1,000 fatal police shootings in 2015 puts it at about a quarter.
These shootings are another tragic symptom of our contemptible outsourcing of the severely mental ill to law enforcement. The police are our de facto front-line mental-health workers — “armed social workers” in the pungent phrase of one observer — and jails are our de facto psychiatric hospital system.
[. . .]



It’s a poignant lament, but why do the families of the severely mentally ill need to rely on the police for medical assistance? When someone has a heart attack or gets cancer, we don’t call the police.
[. . .]
A more rational and humane policy would give families robust treatment options before it gets to the point of calling the cops. This would mean more psychiatric hospital beds and more options for mandated care. Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) has a bill to push the mental-health system in this direction.
The alternative is to continue to default to police to cope with out-of-control people, often brandishing weapons, and hope for the best — and brace for the worst.

http://nypost.com/2016/01/04/dumping-americas-mental-health-woes-on-the-cops/

Dumping America’s mental-health woes on the cops
By Rich Lowry
New York Post
January 4, 2016 | 1:46pm

* * *

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429164/police-shootings-mental-illness-problem?target=author&tid=900170

Outsourcing the Mentally Ill to Police
by RICH LOWRY
January 1, 2016 12:00 AM
National Review

Parents of Disabled Girl Obtain Treatment To Stunt Her Growth

Jenn, left, and Mark Hooper sit for a photo with their three children, from left, Cody, Zak and Charley in Bali.
Photo: AP

[From article]
Charley Hooper is so disabled that her mother considers her “unabled.”
At 10, she cannot speak, walk or see anything beyond light and dark and perhaps the shadowy shape of a face held inches away. As she grew bigger, her parents feared she would eventually become too heavy to take anywhere.
So Jenn and Mark Hooper came up with a radical solution. The New Zealand couple gave their daughter hormones to stop her growth. Then they had doctors remove her womb to spare her the pain of menstruation. Charley is now around 4 foot 3 and 53 pounds, and will remain so for the rest of her life.
A small but increasing number of families across the US, Europe and New Zealand are turning to what is known as growth attenuation in an attempt to improve the lives of their disabled children. The practice is highly controversial: Many see the very idea of stunting and sterilizing the disabled as a violation of human rights. But parents such as the Hoopers say it helps their children preserve their quality of life.
[. . .]


Mark Hooper carries his daughter Charley in Bali.

Photo: AP

“People are really entitled to grow and to become the people they were meant to be,” says Margaret Nygren, CEO of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. “Would you ever want this kind of treatment done to you without your consent or knowledge? And if the answer is no, then why would one want to do that to someone else?”
Yet for Charley’s parents, that question is moot, because they have never been able to ask for her consent on anything. They have always had to imagine what their daughter would want.
Charley is a jumble of uncontrolled limbs with a floppy head that needs supporting. Her parents try to interpret what she feels by the pitch and volume of her moans, and whether her freckled face is relaxed or contorted in a gaping yawn because of intense muscle contractions. The warm sun on her skin can trigger a smile, but is it a sign of joy or a reflex?
[. . .]
Today, Charley joins her family on trips to the mall and vacations to Bali. Her parents soothe her by cuddling her in their laps and carrying her in their arms. None of that would be possible, they say, if she was bigger.
[. . .]
“We don’t expect her to live forever. We don’t want her to live forever. Who wants this life forever?” Jenn says. “So we give her the best life we can while we’ve got her.”

http://nypost.com/2015/10/26/parents-stunt-disabled-daughters-growth-in-controversial-treatment/

Parents stunt disabled daughter’s growth in controversial treatment
By Associated Press
New York Post
October 26, 2015 | 10:40am

Wife Of NYC Mayor Promotes Psychiatry For People Without Homes

A captive population will be provided psychiatric drugs at taxpayer expense. Human services industry professionals, the psychiatric industry supported by the pharmaceutical industry will continue earning taxpayer money while persons without homes, remain homeless. An example of the public policy priorities. Corporations and professionals earn taxpayer funds treating vulnerable persons who remain vulnerable and subject to treatment using taxpayer funds. It is an unending source of income. How much in campaign contributions does this concerned Mayor receive each cycle? 

[From article]
Mayor Bill de Blasio admitted Thursday he has “real concern” about the homeless people taking over the city’s streets.
“I think it’s a real concern and I share the concern of my constituents who have said to me they’re worried that there are homeless people on the streets,” he said at an event in Brooklyn.
His comments come after The Post revealed how more vagrants are setting up shop in neighborhoods all over the city — including the Upper West Side.
But de Blasio denied that the problem stems from an actual rise in homelessness.
“The actual numbers, thank God, suggest that the reality is a little different — that the actual number of street homeless has gone down a bit,” he said. “But that doesn’t make it any less of a problem for so many people.”
The city’s first lady is planning to unveil a “very bold plan” that will change how New York handles mental health problems, de Blasio said.
“Let’s face it, a lot of our street homeless have very serious mental health issues and substance abuse issues and we intend to treat this situation very differently,” he said.

http://nypost.com/2015/07/09/de-blasio-has-real-concern-about-homeless-on-nyc-streets/

De Blasio has ‘real concern’ about homeless on NYC streets
By Yoav Gonen and Sophia Rosenbaum
New York Post
July 9, 2015 | 1:24pm

CS Lewis: The Trouble With The Therapeutic State

[From essay]
the Humanitarian theory. Those who hold it think that it is mild and merciful. In this I believe that they are seriously mistaken. I believe that the “Humanity” which it claims is a dangerous illusion and disguises the possibility of cruelty and injustice without end. I urge a return to the traditional or Retributive theory not solely, not even primarily, in the interests of society, but in the interests of the criminal.
[. . .]
According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it, and as much as he deserves, is mere revenge, and, therefore, barbarous and immoral. It is maintained that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that all crime is more or less pathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic. Thus it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick. What could be more amiable? One little point which is taken for granted in this theory needs, however, to be made explicit. The things done to the criminal, even if they are called cures, will be just as compulsory as they were in the old days when we called them punishments.
[. . .]
Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.
[. . .]
Only the expert ‘penologist’ (let barbarous things have barbarous names), in the light of previous experiment, can tell us what is likely to deter: only the psychotherapist can tell us what is likely to cure. It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, ‘but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate
[. . .]
The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticize and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice.
[. . .]
The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community’s moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts—and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature—who inflict it.
[. . .]
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
[. . .]
To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
[. . .]
We know that one school of psychology already regards religion as a neurosis. When this particular neurosis becomes inconvenient to government, what is to hinder government from proceeding to ‘cure’ it? Such ‘cure’ will, of course, be compulsory; but under the Humanitarian theory it will not be called by the shocking name of Persecution.
[. . .]
Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic.
[. . .]
If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned.
[. . .]
But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live.

http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian.html

The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
C. S. Lewis (1949), Th e h u ma n i t a r i a n t heor y o f p u n i s h me n t ,
The Twentieth Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, 3(3), 5-12.

Elders and Poor Endangered By New Health Care Law

[From article]
Medicaid, the government program that ostensibly provides health coverage for the poor, imposes so much red tape and pays so parsimoniously that she simply cannot afford to treat these patients if she wishes to avoid bankruptcy.
[. . .]
“There’s a massive fallacy at the heart of Medicaid and therefore at the heart of Obamacare. It’s the idea that health insurance equals health care.” And, as is usually the case with the deliberately deceptive fallacies promoted by the Democrats, the target victims are poor Americans. Just as Obamacare’s Medicare Advantage cuts will be felt primarily by low-income seniors, its Medicaid fraud will hurt the country’s most vulnerable patients. It will restrict their access to doctors and reduce the quality of what little care they receive.
[. . .]

“It has gotten so bad that, in the average state, for every dollar that a private insurer pays a primary care physician to care for a patient, Medicaid pays 52 cents.” Many states pay even less. New York, for example, pays 29 cents.
[. . .]
The Democrat record regarding the underprivileged isn’t pretty. They defended slavery, enforced racial segregation, opposed women’s suffrage, and still chain low-income students to public schools that teach them virtually nothing. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the Democrats have created a health “reform” program that denies poor people access to decent medical care.

http://spectator.org/articles/57334/obamacare’s-medicaid-fraud

OBAMACARE’S MEDICAID FRAUD
Dooming the poor to third-rate health care.
By David Catron

1.6.14

Poor Communication Between Doctor and Patient

Not mentioned in this brief report is that doctors often resent being questioned by their "ignorant" patients. One man who tries to keep up on new medical developments encountered the negative reaction of his doctor when he repeated what he had read about treatment e.g., over use of antibiotics. "Who is he to question my wisdom." is what doctors think. Few of them are willing to take the time to explain what they know to reassure their patient. When a patient discussed this with two medical students they were still open about this problem, revealing that they had discussed that in class that day. Yet another young physician at a prestigious hospital got upset when asked why doctors do not listen to their patients. She said,"Patients don't listen to their doctors." That suggests a communication problem. Is that for the patient to resolve? Medical reporting encourages patients to get involved with their treatment, to ask questions of their doctors. But when they do, they get negative reactions. Is this an ego problem among professionals?

[From article]
only one in seven said they would disagree with their doctor over treatment, some saying it would not be socially acceptable or would damage their relationship with the doctor.
[...]
are very nervous about this idea of pushing back against doctor recommendations for fear of being labeled 'a bad patient,

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-patients-idUSBRE86B07220120712

Patients avoid disagreeing with doctor, may ignore advice
Thu Jul 12, 2012 2:03am EDT
Reuters
Reporting from New York by Genevra Pittman at Reuters Health; editing by Elaine Lies

Drug Resistent Gonorrhea

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/11/us-gonorrhoea-superbug-idUSTRE76A0YO20110711

Scientists find first superbug strain of gonorrhea
By Kate Kelland
Reuters
LONDON
Mon Jul 11, 2011 4:35am EDT

Strokes Happen During Sleep

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/09/us-strokes-idUSTRE7485ZK20110509

One in seven strokes happens during sleep
By Alison McCook
Reuters NEW YORK
Mon May 9, 2011 4:21pm EDT