The Big Business of Sex Addiction
Cast your mind back to a time before sex addiction qualified as a legitimate issue rather than a snarky euphemism (although for some that might still be the case) Hard to remember, what with the Bill Clintons and Tiger Woodses (continued).
Cast your mind back to a time before sex addiction qualified as a legitimate issue rather than a snarky euphemism (although for some that might still be the case). Hard to remember, what with the Bill Clintons and Tiger Woodses bringing the term into common parlance?
Well, according to trained sex addiction therapist Alexandra Katehakis, her field hardly existed in 1997, but thanks to Clinton and Woods and maybe Eric Benet, or maybe not, the problem is gaining ground in psychotherapy circles — so much so that it might graduate someday to full disorder status. –KA
WAIT, BEFORE YOU GO…Los Angeles Times:
The for-profit field is booming, thanks largely to Tiger Woods and other celebrities whose public visits to rehab have moved sex addiction, a controversial diagnosis not recognized by the medical establishment, into the mainstream and led a growing number of Americans to conclude that they — or in many cases, their spouses — needed treatment.
A testament to the increasing demand for services and the potential money to be made providing them is the entrance into the sex addiction market this week of the private-equity-backed corporation that owns Promises, the high-end Malibu drug rehabilitation center known for its Hollywood clientele. The Cerritos company, Elements Behavioral Health, is buying a Westside treatment center, the Sexual Recovery Institute, as part of an expansion that will eventually include luxe in-patient facilities like Promises for wealthy sex addicts and a national network of two-week outpatient programs for those of lesser means.
The company has not disclosed the purchase price, but Chief Executive David Sack said Elements was making a significant investment on the belief that the Internet, with its easy access to pornography and casual liaisons, had created an epidemic of untreated sex addiction in America and that the rehab stays of Woods, actors Russell Brand and David Duchovny and others had informed a previously ignorant public about the existence of treatment programs.
“You have a backlog of people who need this treatment, and all of a sudden through a celebrity they have become aware that something can be done,” said Sack, a psychiatrist.
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