(LifeSiteNews) — Like most addictions, pornography is a false promise: Users believe it will make them feel better, but the gratification is momentary. Self-loathing and depression after use are incredibly common.
Over a decade of speaking on pornography to high school students, this observation stands out. Porn users experience acute mental distress, despair, and hopelessness as the strength of their addiction becomes clear. What began as casual viewing or a curious click on a pop-up frequently turns into something all-consuming.
A new study in the journal Addictive Behaviors, titled “Problematic pornography use and psychological distress: A longitudinal study in a large US sample,” highlights these impacts once again. The authors conclude that although “problematic pornography use tends to remain stable over time,” it is “strongly associated with psychological distress such as anxiety and depression.”
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As PsyPost summarized it, these findings “suggest that while some people may experience short-term relief from distress through pornography use, long-term patterns of dysregulation are tied to more persistent psychological difficulties.”
As rates of depression and anxiety skyrocket across the United States among young people and the age of first exposure to pornography consistently drops (it is now between the ages of 9 and 11), this connection is worthy of more research. We know that pornography is profoundly damaging for a wide range of reasons – but its association with long-term mental health struggles is yet another aspect of its poisonous effects.
The study notes that pornography is “widely used,” but that those who use it “often report difficulty controlling their use and suffer negative consequences in their personal, professional, or emotional lives,” which has “recently gained clinical recognition under the diagnostic label of Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder in the World Health Organization’s latest classification system.” The researchers emphasized that little work has been done on these connections thus far.
The lead author of the study, Robin Engelhardt of Bundeswehr University, noted that there is a “necessity to scientifically catch up in this field. Previous studies depicted comparatively high prevalence rates of problematic pornography use and associations with psychological distress.” The new study examines over 4,300 American adults and used previous research on the connections between mental health and porn use. As PsyPost summarized:
Psychological distress was also stable across timepoints, and the researchers found a strong positive association between pornography dysregulation and distress at the level of individuals. That is, people who tended to score higher on pornography problems also tended to report more distress, and vice versa. This suggests a stable, trait-like relationship between the two.
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The study, Engelhardt said, found “a trait-like connection between problematic pornography use and psychological distress. They appear to be the same construct – problematic pornography use appears a part of psychological distress and psychological distress a part of problematic pornography use. However, cross-sectional studies may not depict this underlying strong time-consistent association due to small time-dependent inhibition effects that let the association appear smaller.”
This study emphasizes a reality that many porn users readily admit to: they feel self-loathing after use, and their perceived helplessness in the face of consistent addiction leads to depressive episodes or depression. I have spoken to young men who openly cried because they felt powerless to escape an addiction that, in most cases, had begun in pre-adolescence. As pornography addictions begin at younger and younger ages, the mental health effects become more acute.
Mental health experts have been sounding the alarm on the declining mental health of young people for several years. We have some research on how pornography is impacting the minds of teens, but much more is needed.
