 |
| Melinkovich last year in West Hollywood, Calif. He has fought powerful urges for years |
A difference between an addict and a recovering addict is that one
hides his behavior, while the other can't stop talking about it.
Self-revelation is an important part of recovery, but it can lead to
awkward moments when you meet a person who identifies as a sex addict.
For
instance, within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a
59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in
Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time
in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at
the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a
prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red lipstick on
himself. It turned out to be blood from the woman's mouth. He washed in a
gas-station bathroom, met his girlfriend at the airport and then, in
the grip of his insatiability, had unprotected sex with her as soon as
they got home — in the same bed he said he had used to entertain three
other women in the days before.
Is
this a man with colossally bad judgment or one with a blameless
addictive disorder? In the past year, this question has presented itself
with dependable regularity. Most famously, Tiger Woods received
sex-addiction treatment last winter after he admitted to infidelities;
at least a dozen women came forward to claim they'd had sex with him.
The chronically undisciplined Charlie Sheen recently sought help in
controlling a variety of runaway appetites, including a fondness for the
company of porn actresses. Earlier this month, Republican Congressmen
Christopher Lee resigned after he was caught e-mailing a shirtless photo
of himself to entice a woman he met on Craigslist. And then there is
Silvio Berlusconi, the uninhibited Prime Minister of Italy, where
prosecutors want him to face trial for accusations that he paid an
underage girl to have sex with him. Berlusconi has never hidden his
partiality to beautiful women, but he has called the allegations — and
reports of louche parties at his villa — politically motivated. All
these cases differ in scope, but a central question remains: Why would
these men risk everything to satisfy their urges?
When it comes
to addiction, the line between morality and disease has always been
blurry. But only in the past 25 years have we come to regard excesses in
necessary cravings — hunger for food, lust for sex — as possible
disease states. In 1983, when Melinkovich was continuously cheating on
his then wife (an actress from Planet of the Apes), a Minnesota-based addiction-treatment organization called the Hazelden Foundation published a foundational book called Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction.
The book, which is still in publication, helped create the field of
sex-addiction treatment. Its author, Patrick Carnes, is now executive
director of Gentle Path, the sex-addict program Woods is said to have
entered last year in Hattiesburg, Miss.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is debating whether sex addiction should be added to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The addition of what the APA is calling "hypersexual disorder" would
legitimize sex addiction in a way that was unthinkable just a few years
ago, when Bill Clinton's philandering was regarded as a moral failing or
a joke — but not, in the main, as an illness.
APA recognition of
sex addiction would create huge revenue streams in the mental-health
business. Some wives who know their husbands are porn enthusiasts would
force them into treatment. Some husbands who have serial affairs would
start to think of themselves not as rakes but as patients.
This
is already happening. In the year since Woods made sex addiction famous,
rehab facilities accustomed to dealing with alcoholics and drug addicts
have found themselves swamped with requests for sex-addiction
treatment. The privately held company Elements Behavioral Health, which
operates high-priced rehab centers around the U.S. — including a
celebrity-friendly one on a breathtaking mountainside in Malibu, Calif. —
recently acquired the Sexual Recovery Institute, a Los Angeles center
for sex addicts. The institute's revenues grew 50% in 2010.
But
the legitimacy now being granted to sex addiction requires a closer
look. In the 20th century, we changed our thinking about alcoholism:
what was once a moral weakness came to be understood as an illness
resulting in large part from genetics. Sexual acting out seems
different, though. Is excessive lust really just another biochemical
accident?
No comments:
Post a Comment