Sexual Addiction aka Compulsive Sexual Behaviour (Disorder)

"[Symptoms of 'compulsive sexual behaviour disorder' can include] repetitive sexual activities becoming a central focus of the person's life."
"[Attempts to reduce the behaviour failing, and] continued repetitive sexual behaviour despite adverse consequences [are recognized symptoms]."
"Distress that is entirely related to moral judgments and disapproval about sexual impulses, urges or behaviours is not sufficient to meet this requirement [defining compulsive sexual behaviour]."
World Health Organization (WHO)

"From Tiger Woods to Harvey Weinstein, news articles have conjectured that 'sex addiction' is a growing and heretofore unrecognized 'epidemic', while the scientific community debates whether such a problem even exists."
Newly published study: JAMA Network Open

"There is a lot of controversy here, but we wanted to assess the one thing that is common in all these different conceptualizations -- the difficulty in controlling sexual urges and behaviours."
“It’s a lot more people than we expected to be having difficulty controlling sexual urges and behaviors and who are feeling distressed and impaired."
"The differences between the sexes are a lot less than we would have expected, raising concerns that the difficulty in controlling sexual behavior affects more than just men."
Janna Dickenson, lead author, post-doctoral fellow human sexuality, University of Minnesota

"It's interfering in the woman's life, she's paying for services, she feels a sense of it being out of control."
"In the cases I've seen there was a very kind of obsessional component to it, an anxiety-relieving component to it."
Dr. Lori Brotto, director, sexual health laboratory, University of British Columbia

"There are a lot of people in my patient population - regular folks - who really struggle with their sexual impulses. There are folks who are engaging with sex workers when they travel. Others struggle with pornography or the temptation to step away from marital fidelity. Many take risks even when it can impact their lives."
"I’ve had a lot of patients like that. They start out just poking around on the Internet. Then they’re doing it more and more. And then it becomes a problem for them. Their spouse gets all upset, or someone walks in on them. Then they come looking for help."
Thomas G. Plante, professor of psychology, Santa Clara University, California, adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry, Stanford University School of Medicine

A recently published study indicates that a significantly measurable percentage of any population is haunted with a newly identified (and controversial) disorder named compulsive sexual behaviour. The study set out to examine just how prevalent it is among the general population that overt sexual behaviour control has become a problem for people, given the revelations of the last several years of sexual misconduct on the part of people from all walks of life.

What the behavioural researchers discovered came as a surprise to them -- out of their study of 2,325 adults in the U.S. -- ten percent of whom were men professing by their responses to a set of questions to be evaluated with respect to prevalence and urges and repeat behaviours, and a more surprising seven percent comprised of women. All met the clinical cut-off point for 'compulsive sexual behaviour disorder' newly recognized as a sexual pathology involving an inability to control intense, repetitive urges and feelings of a persistent nature.

That sexual behaviour of a type identified as "that causes marked distress or social impairment". The condition was assumed to be prevalent in fewer numbers; between one and six percent of the population, men assumed to rate between two and five times likelier to express the disorder than women. So when the researchers set out to evaluate the results of the study, they assumed that 20 to 30 percent of those meeting the clinical cut-off point would be female. Their conclusion was otherwise; women accounting for 41 percent of those qualifying for a CSBD diagnosis.

About 10 percent of men and six percent of women in the US struggle with hard-to-control sexual urges raising concerns among psychiatrists

Both sexes exhibited a complete range of sexual symptoms from "problematic" yet nonclinical out-of-control sexual behaviour (failing to meet the standard for a formal diagnosis), to the opposite end of the spectrum; certifiable psychiatric disorder. The conclusion is anything but definitive in that the lines are hazy between when sexual urges, feelings and behaviours cross from normal to compulsive to become a pathological brain disorder.

A 13-item screening tool was used, meant to categorize their sample subjects (adults aged 18 to 50) who met criteria for a potential diagnosis of compulsive sexual behaviour, with questions such as How often -- never to very frequently -- people felt unable to control their sexual feelings and urges; How often they've concealed or hidden their behaviour from others; and How often they relied on excuses to justify their behaviour.

Lead author Dickenson felt that a reasonable explanation for women accounting for a larger than anticipated percentage of sexual disorder could be the result of a cultural shift toward more "permissive female sexual expression", along with the ready accessibility of online sexual imagery and a general social atmosphere of casual sex. The newer access to sexuality sites, along with anonymity given the Internet's ubiquitous use by people to forge relationships may also be counted as a possible vector. 

"They kind of mix things up, for example, using ‘impulsive’ and ‘compulsive’ interchangeably. They do find a high rate of people with some sort of distress with their sexuality. But is it impulsive, compulsive, addictive? Is it something else? You can’t tell from what they did."
"What you can take from this research is that there are a pretty decent percentage of people who are complaining about some sort of negative feelings about their sexuality. And those negative feelings are leading to some distress."
Robert Hudak,  associate professor of psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pennsylvania, medical director, Obsessive Compulsive Disorders Outpatient Program, Western Psychiatric Hospital, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center