Terry Crews has been widely applauded for a series of videos where he says he’s addicted to poronography.
The Brooklyn Nine-Nine actor and former NFL player had previously admitted his addiction to pornography began when he was 12 years old. He goes further into the topic in a series of videos entitled “Dirty Little Secret,” which was posted on his Facebook page.
Though Crews’s videos resonated with a number of people, the idea of porn addiction continues to divide experts.
It’s not an official diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which is widely used by clinicians and researchers. While the APA notes that pornography can be “problematic” for some people, it admits that experts are unsure of “how to classify excessive porn use.” A Canadian researcher had to abandon a study on the impact of pornography on men’s sexuality because he couldn’t find any men who had never viewed sexually-explicit material.
The APA did consider listing a diagnostic addiction called hypersexual disorder, which included a pornography subtype, but decided against it in the end, citing a lack of evidence.
That said, there have been a few important studies. This includes a 2013 study, where researchers analyzed the brain responses of 52 people, including 13 women, who self-reported having problems with their porn consumption. The researchers specifically studied a brain response known as P300, which usually increases when people are presented with a stimulus they have previously engaged with. For example, people with drug addiction have a higher P300 value when they view drug-related images.
Researchers expected to see a higher P300 with individuals who reported greater difficulty in controlling their porn consumption, but that was not the case. Instead, researchers concluded that those who struggled with their porn consumption weren’t necessarily addicts, and their behavior might be better described as a “compulsion.”
Others are far more critical of the state of sexual-addiction research. David Ley, a clinical psychologist and author of The Myth of Sex Addiction, argued that these studies are “hindered by poor experimental designs, limited methodological rigour, and lack of model specification.”
Ley slammed the largely unregulated “lucrative industry” that has recently popped up offering treatment that’s not based on much evidence. A quick search for “pornography addiction” on Amazon turned up over 1,400 book results, with a significant number categorized under religion and spirituality. Unsurprisingly, another study showed religious people were more likely to feel like they were addicted to porn.
Meanwhile, Crews himself hit back at people who don’t believe it’s possible to be addicted to porn. “If day turns into night and you’re still watching, you probably got a problem,” he said.