A 21-year-old white man allegedly entered three different spas in the greater Atlanta area on March 16 and shot dead eight people, six of them Asian women. The next day, Cherokee County Sheriff’s officials announced that the suspect was to blame as a possible motive for the murder: sex addiction.
The alleged shooter was described as a devout conservative evangelical Christian who, according to numerous reports, struggled to control his sexual behavior. According to law enforcement, the suspect claimed he was dealing with sex addiction and was eventually killed as a way to ‘eliminate’ the “temptation” he had of these women.
I am a researcher specializing in behavioral addiction, specifically sexual addiction. Much of my research has focused on how religion interacts with sexual behavior and feelings of addiction. Over the past decade, my research has found that religion and sexual addiction are deeply intertwined.
Clinicians do not diagnose ‘sex addiction’
At present, there is no diagnosis of ‘sex addiction’ in any diagnostic manual that psychologists consult when working with patients. This is not a recognized disorder in the mental health community. This may come as a surprise to some people, as many people believe that sex can be addictive.
Without calling the problem an addiction, mental health practitioners naturally realize that out-of-control sexual behavior can be a real problem for individuals. Recently, the World Health Organization announced that the latest issue of its “International Classification of Diseases” will include a new diagnosis of compulsive sexual behavior disorder.
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This new diagnosis is officially an impulse control disorder rather than an addiction, but it covers people with excessive or compulsive sexual behavior that most members of the public would consider addictive. Any number of behaviors may be eligible for this diagnosis, ranging from excessive use of pornography and masturbation to seeking casual sex to the request of sex workers. The most important feature of the diagnosis is not the specific sexual behavior itself, but how out of control it has become in a person’s life and how many problems it causes.
Compulsive sexual behavior disorder is the only diagnosis in more than 55,000 diagnoses in the WHO manual that contains a special reservation. At the very end of the description of the disease, it is noted that ‘distress entirely connected with moral judgments and disapproval of sexual impulses, urges, or behaviors is not sufficient to meet this requirement.’
In other words, you feel uneasy about sexual ways that you find morally wrong are not sufficient for the diagnosis of this new disease. This is a very important warning, because based on my research, it is moral distress about sex behaviors that usually leads people to believe that they have sex addiction.
What feeds a self-diagnosis of ‘sex addiction’?
In the U.S. in particular, many studies have clearly shown that more religious people, people with a stricter religious background, and people who morally disapprove of their own sexual behavior are more likely to interpret this behavior as addiction.
What is surprising is that there is also a lot of evidence that the same people are actually less likely to do things like watch pornography or have sex outside of marital relationships. My colleagues and I have found that religiously devoted people report less use of pornography at the same time, while also reporting pornography addiction.
Conservative moral views on sexuality, especially those associated with conservative religions, seem to lead some people to interpret behaviors, such as sometimes viewing pornography as a sign of addiction.
My colleagues and I call this break between beliefs and behavior ‘moral incongruence’. It turns out to be a powerful predictor or someone thinks they have sex addiction.
In fact, we have now shown in two studies using nationwide representative samples that religiosity and moral disapproval of pornography reinforce the links between pornography viewing and feelings of addiction to pornography. For people who do not find pornography morally offensive or non-religious, there is virtually no relationship between how much pornography they see and whether they believe they are addicted to it. But for people who are very religious or who find the view of pornography particularly wrong, even small amounts of pornography are linked to feelings of addiction that are reported by themselves.
Internal unrest does not predict violence
To be clear, the distress that people may experience if they fall short of their morals is undoubtedly real and profound. Much of this distress is probably the result of guilt and shame rather than a true addiction.
In the case of the Georgia shooter, there is simply not enough information yet to determine whether he had an out-of-control pattern of sexual behavior, whether he was morally concerned about his behavior, and whether it was both. Honestly, these distinctions are not so important to understand what happened.
Compulsive sexual behavior disorder and moral incongruence are both real problems that can lead to relationship conflict, depression, anxiety and other consequences. But they are not excuses for violence, murder or hate crimes – nothing is. If recent estimates are correct, there are millions of Americans who are concerned that their sexual behavior may be out of control.
Yet the Atlanta suspect decided to do something these millions of other Americans do not have, and allegedly targeted women he saw as a temptation. This choice on his part can in no way be attributed to the question of whether he had a sexual addiction, whether he had moral inconsistency about his sexual behavior or that he had a bad day.
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