Treatment of Psychosexual Disorders
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” the old cliché goes. Medicine continues to find an answer to the many diseases that have hammered the human species through time. Though by no means is it to suggest that discovering remedies to diseases such as malaria is an easy task, sicknesses caused by the external environment do have a certain consistency in symptoms, effects, and treatments. This consistency is not a luxury afforded by psychological disorders, which have a profound effect on the health of an individual. In the case of psychosexual disorders, this is because it is difficult to narrow down the specific cause and effect relationship in psychosexual disorders. And when it is difficult to narrow down the source and impact of these disorders, then it lends itself to mistaken prognostication and a lack of adequate treatment.
The first difficulty in finding adequate treatment of psychosexual disorders in men is that sometimes the field of medicine relies on traditional medication to resolve unconventional and inconsistent psychosexual behavior. Incidences of psychosexual dysfunctions, such as impotence in men or lack of arousal in females, are popularly assigned biological and health reasons in medicine. Therefore, the solution comes in the form of a prescribed pill or recommendation of a change in lifestyle, such as exercise or less stress.
Undoubtedly, there is validity to the medical causes of psychosexual dysfunctions. However, sometimes it is too superficial; sometimes, the problems, insecurities, and anxieties that accompany psychosexual disorders are significantly more deep-rooted. If that is the case, just as prescribing anti-depressants has shown its ill-side effects for sufferers of depression, it does little good to depend purely on medication for treatment of psychosexual disorders. So, what are real and tried treatments to the vast and diverse forms of psychosexual disorders?
Therapy and discussion of the problems are, to psychosexual psychologists, the most reliable form of treatment of psychosexual disorders. Sex therapy, for example, focuses to redirect sexual stimuli of patients who may get their rocks off from anomalous sexual stimuli, such bestiality or necrophilia.
Psychotherapy is a popular form of therapy too, in where the focus shifts to the origins of stress for the patient in order to investigate how perhaps to recondition their reaction. Psychotherapy for men is generally pretty helpful for non medical sexual dysfunctions. When the sexual dysfuntions are rooted in the relationship, psychotherapy for couples is suggested. Psychotherapy is a long term treatment which may continue for 2-3 years since the roots of sexual dysfunctions may lie in chilhood. It may take a long time to explore the source of and to remedy the disorder.
Behavioral therapy has the patient working with a psychiatrist or psychologist in order to unlearn the behaviors that extend from the psychosexual disorders that have become automatic. Behavioral therapy works well especially with the thinking patterns that cause anxieties. For sexual perversions, behavioral therapy obtains successful results in many cases.
The use of therapy acknowledges that the mind is flexible. Much like psychosexual disorders are believed to be shaped by events and circumstances during the life of the patient, so too can the healthy confrontation of these disorders through therapy be used to reshape them. In most cases, sex therapy, psychosexual therapy or behavioral therapy are used in combinations for a certain remedy of sexual dysfunctions.
[ad#downcont]Even still, psychosexual psychologists do not doubt the impact of hormones in the role of the patients especially in those with gender identity disorders. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) are a class of compounds used as antidepressants and are popularly provided to control sexual perversions, such as on rapists, because of its cause of decline in libido. With a societal focus on ‘mental health’, however, it is not common practice to prescribe pills to remedy the psychosexual disorders of a patient. Because of the complexities and uniqueness of each individual case, it is impossible to provide a uniform treatment of psychosexual disorders. After all, how can one figure out the cure, when specialists are still trying to unravel the causes originating from the human mind?