A 21-year-old white man reportedly entered three different spas in the Atlanta metropolitan area on March 16 and killed eight people, six of whom were Asian. The next day, Cherokee County sheriff’s officers announced what the suspect blamed as a possible reason for the murders: sex addiction.
The alleged sniper was described as a devout and conservative evangelical Christian who, according to several reports, has struggled to control his sexual behavior. Law enforcement officials said the suspect claimed to be dealing with a sex addiction and ended up dead as a way to “eliminate” the “temptation” he felt these women represented.
I am a researcher specializing in behavioral addictions, specifically sexual addictions. Much of my research has focused on how religion interacts with sexual behaviors and feelings of addiction. In the past decade, my research has found that religion and sexual addiction are deeply intertwined.
Doctors do not diagnose ‘sexual addiction’
At the moment, there is no diagnosis of “sexual addiction” in any diagnostic manual that psychologists consult when working with patients. It is not a recognized disorder in the mental health community. This may come as a surprise to some, as many people believe that sex can be addictive.
Without qualifying the addiction problem, mental health professionals recognize, of course, that uncontrolled sexual behaviors can be a real problem for individuals. The World Health Organization recently announced that the latest edition 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 behaviors that the majority of the public would consider an addiction. Any number of behaviors can qualify for this diagnosis, ranging from excessive use of pornography and masturbation to cruises for casual sex and solicitation by sex workers. The main 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 much difficulty or damage it causes.
Compulsive sexual behavior disorder is the only diagnosis in more than 55,000 diagnoses in the WHO manual to include a special warning. Right at the end of the description of the disorder, there is a note warning that “anguish that is totally related to moral judgments and disapproval of sexual impulses, impulses or behaviors is not enough to meet this requirement.”
In other words, feeling distressed about the sexual behavior that you think is morally wrong is not enough to diagnose this new disorder. This is a very important caveat because, based on my research, it is the moral distress about sexual behaviors that normally makes people believe they have an addiction to sex.
What fuels a self-diagnosis of ‘sexual addiction’?
In the United States, in particular, many studies have clearly shown that more religious people, people of more rigid religious backgrounds, and people who morally disapprove of their own sexual behaviors are much more likely to interpret these behaviors as an addiction.
What is surprising is that there is also a lot of evidence that these same people are less likely to do things like watch porn or have sex outside of a marital relationship. My colleagues and I have found that more religious people simultaneously report less use of pornography and, at the same time, a greater addiction to pornography.
It seems that conservative moral beliefs about sexuality, particularly those associated with conservative religiosity, lead some people to interpret behaviors like watching pornography occasionally as signs of an addiction.
My colleagues and I call this disconnect between beliefs and behavior “moral incongruity”. It turns out to be a powerful indicator of whether someone thinks they have an addiction to sex.
In fact, we now show in two studies that used nationally representative samples that the religiosity and moral disapproval of pornography widens the links between viewing pornography and feelings of dependence on pornography. For people who do not consider pornography to be morally objectionable or who are not religious, there is virtually no connection between the amount of pornography they see and whether they are believed to be addicted to it. However, for people who are very religious or who think that watching pornography is especially wrong, even small amounts of pornography use are linked to self-reported feelings of addiction.
Internal turmoil does not predict violence
To be clear, the anguish that people can feel when they fall short of their morals is undoubtedly real and profound. However, much of this distress is probably the result of guilt and shame, and not a real addiction.
In the case of the Georgia sniper, there is simply not enough information to determine whether he had an out of control sexual behavior pattern, whether he was morally distressed by his behavior or whether it was both. Frankly, these distinctions are not so important for understanding what happened.
Compulsive sexual behavior disorder and moral incongruence are real problems that can lead to relationship conflicts, depression, anxiety and other consequences. But they are no excuse for crimes of violence, murder or hatred – nothing is. If recent estimates are correct, there are millions of Americans concerned that their sexual behavior may be out of control.
However, the Atlanta suspect chose to do something that these millions of other Americans did not do, supposedly targeting and killing women he considered “a temptation”. This choice on his part cannot be attributed in any way to the fact that he has a sexual addiction, whether he felt moral incongruence about his sexual behaviors or whether he was having a bad day.
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