Hypersexuality and Depression
I remember learning about individuals with depression being at higher risk for addiction. Back then I thought addiction looked like a back alley where you sell the shirt off your back to get a hit that won’t even last you the day. Even then, when I was in seedy parts of town, back alleys, and cheep motel rooms, I didn’t recognize it in myself because addiction is always portrayed as the bottom of a bottle or a discarded needle. So, I’m here to talk about it.
Depression effects different people in different ways. For some it causes insomnia that keeps them up for hours or even days. For me I couldn’t keep myself awake, constantly falling asleep whether I wanted to or not. Depression can also strip people or their libido. Why would anyone want sex when they’re so lethargic, so disconnected from other people, so depressed?
Hypersexuality is not inherently caused by depression, but rather is a coping mechanism for dealing with depression and its symptoms in the same way people use substances or self harm to try and (temporarily) alleviate their depression. It becomes a type of addiction precisely because of the fact that sex seems so antithetical to depression. It is, in the mind of someone with hypersexuality and depression, a way to get what they feel they lack: to feel wanted or desired, to have a connection with another person, to be energetic, to be passionate, to feel happiness, to feel pleasure. It seems like the perfect cocktail and, generally, without the risk of drugs or self harm, so why doesn’t it work?
The thing about coping mechanisms is just that, they’re for coping with an illness, not for curing or treating it. Hypersexuality fails to treat depression because sexual gratification is fleeting, temporary. That is why healthy sexuality becomes hypersexuality under these conditions, because there is a constant need for more sexual stimuli because it is only effective in staving off depressive symptoms for a finite amount of time.
Just like other addictions hypersexuality must escalate in order to be maintained. Porn addiction often goes hand in hand with hypersexuality since pornography is the most widely available sexual stimuli after self stimulation, and it starts slowly, maybe just one image is enough at first, then maybe a short video, but as our brain normalizes this stimuli it no longer provides the kick of pleasure it did once before and one must escalate further. Hypersexuality works in a similar way, maybe starting small, sexting someone you know, but slowly escalating over time into something very dangerous.
Different hypersexual people will escalate in different ways, for me it started with constant self stimulation and then moved to porn. When I began dating my attention turned towards other people as sources of sexual satisfaction. It started with sexting, then sexual acts, then sex itself, and while I was only doing these things with romantic partners at this point it was still hurting me. My relationships weren’t healthy and often suffered due to my constant desire for more stimuli. Sex was often dissatisfying or even painful, I was molested and raped multiple times, yet I kept going back to try again. I moved on from people I had dated to just people I knew and when I could no longer convince or pressure anyone else into having sex with me I escalated again. I moved on to people I didn’t know, dates that became one night stands morphed into driving for hours to towns I’d never been to a motel I’d never heard of. My last escalation was into BDSM.
My experiences ranged from the disappointing to the traumatic, my relationships suffered, my mental and physical health suffered, my finances suffered, my education and careers suffered, I constantly put myself in danger, and after all that I never did find the sexual satisfaction I was looking for, the feeling so good it would make me whole.
What I had was an addiction, one we don’t often talk about (outside of porn addiction) and one we’re not very sympathetic to. My behavior was alternately encouraged by my peers and the media I had surrounded myself with (sex positivity) and punished, both due to the natural consequences of my actions and by people who did not understand why I was behaving the way I did.
The desire to participate in something that (in theory) feels good when you feel so very bad drives people to make very poor choices and for me that didn’t look like substance abuse, it looked like something different yet oh so familiar.
Depression is complicated, as is sex, and our relationships to both. Hopefully this helps foster understanding of hypersexual behavior as a symptom of mental illness and as an addictive behavior and better helps both people who are hypersexual and people who know hypersexuals handle their condition.
For more information please feel free to contact me here:
https://itisthefunpolice.tumblr.com/ask
For further reading about sex:
https://itisthefunpolice.tumblr.com/post/187942333260/the-sexism-of-sex
https://itisthefunpolice.tumblr.com/post/179945408735/the-sexism-of-sex-abridged
https://itisthefunpolice.tumblr.com/post/190876044030/power-and-control-as-sex
https://itisthefunpolice.tumblr.com/post/190875983785/over-thinking-monster-boys
For further reading about BDSM:
https://itisthefunpolice.tumblr.com/post/182896093995/after-care-the-new-trauma-bonding
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