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Did you see Shelley Osterloh's story the other night on the Eyewitness News?
A local program that has been treating drug and alcohol addictions for more than 35 years is reporting a 400 percent increase this year in requests for sexual addiction treatment.
The culprit is pornography. It is an unrelenting plague that is emotionally and physically addicting – literally!
"A person who is starting to look at pornography and becomes addicted, they will begin to act exactly like any other addict. They will crave it. They will seek it. They will be obsessed by it. It will take over their life just like a cocaine addiction." (Sharon Kay, Ph.D., Executive Director, The Gathering Place)
Blame the accessibility of porn for what is happening. What once was available only in the darkest recesses of society is now a pervasive presence. As reported, 68 million requests are made on search engines for pornography every day. Seventy percent of teens with computer access say they have seen a pornographic website. And most alarming – the average age of first exposure to Internet pornography is 11.
Along with experts like Dr. Kay, KSL believes awareness of pornography's terribly addictive nature is key to helping those who find themselves in its awful grasp. As with alcohol and drugs, intervention by family, friends and professionals may be needed to deal with a potentially devastating addiction.
