Showing posts with label sex. Show all posts

Is Mental Illness Taking A Toll On Your Sex Life? There's Hope


It's very common for depression, anxiety, PTSD and more to affect a couple's sex life.
According to YourTango Expert Dr. Stephanie Buehler, "many people are completely unaware that they have a mental illness, let alone that the mental illness is affecting their sexuality." Here, two experts discuss the ways in which mental illness affects a central aspect of couples' lives—their sexual enjoyment of each other. It is a highly unexplored topic with little research, and we think it's incredibly important to shed light on it so that couples can begin to work toward happiness in this area. After all, according to oursurvey of mental health professionals, 15-30 percent of married couples struggle with mental illness (that's as many as 3 in 10!) 

When it comes to having an effect on sexual enjoyment, mild depression and anxiety are very common. Depression can cause someone to feel shut down and withdrawn. Depressed people will often say that they no longer enjoy something they used to, sex being one of those things. 
Read the full article at Your Tango 
(http://www.yourtango.com/2013191165/toll-mental-illness-can-take-your-married-sex-life)
anxiety

Ouch talk show 100: Sex and relationships special


How does a young man lose his virginity when his arms and legs don't work? What's it like to be both gay and disabled? And is falling in love with your care worker ever a good thing?
Disabled panellists Asta Philpot, Daryl Beeton and Kirsty Liddiard talk sex and relationships with presenters Rob Crossan and Kate Monaghan.
Warning: This programme contains adult themes and some may find it an uncomfortable listen.
But the tone is friendly and informal. Parents of disabled teenagers might appreciate listening to this with their child as a helpful discussion-opener.

Here are some useful links so you can find out more about the people and subjects on talk show 100.
  • Asta Philpot, 32, is from Leeds. He can't use his arms or legs due to arthrogryposis and campaigns for access to sex for people in a similar boat via his personal website. In the 2007 BBC documentary, One Night Only, Asta took two disabled men to a specialist brothel in Spain where he had lost his virginity a year earlier (see Is it OK for disabled people to go to brothels? from the Magazine).
  • Kirsty Liddiard spoke to 25 disabled people about their sex lives for her PhD. She continues to specialise in this field at Rierson University in Toronto, teaching on the BA in disability studies course and she's on the board of directors at the Rose Centre for young adults with disabilities which, amongst other things, helps its clients with matters relating to sex.
  • Daryl Beeton runs Kazzum, a theatre company for young people. He is gay and has a mobility impairment. You may remember him as a contestant on BBC Two's Beyond Boundaries programme.
  • Regard is an organisation which supports people in the UK who are gay and disabled.
  • Fringe disability organisation Outsiders are concerned with "sexual freedom" and expression. They run an annual Sex Maniacs Ball - which isn't quite what the name suggests it might be.
A high quality version is on Audioboo
Read more at BBC News

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-ouch-24030101)
mental illness

Intimacy in an Iron Lung


Intimacy in an Iron Lung

The developing status of sexual surrogates for the disabled, as part of a right to health and well-being: So wrong?


"As my father lay dying and his private nurses washed him, made him comfortable and gave him his medication, they also lingered gently over his private parts as they sponged him. These were mountain girls from the state of North Carolina to whom death and sex were integral with life."

So comments Google+ user Ray Chatham in the discussion surrounding a short documentary released last week from The New York Times' Stefania Rousselle. Rousselle investigated the state of sexual surrogacy for disabled people in France, where it is contentiously illegal.

Surrogacy involves paying a professional who engages in intimate contact (broadly defined, though certainly not always intercourse) with a patient. It technically began in the early 1970s, and is maybe best known as something done to help people with extreme anxiety about sex to gradually work past it.

In a different sense, it's also used for patients with serious physical disabilities -- and, maybe even thornier, mental disabilities like dementia. You might remember the 2012 film The Sessions, for which Helen Hunt got an Oscar nomination playing a surrogate who worked with a poet paralyzed by polio. The story was based on the real experiences of Mark O'Brien, who by the end lived in an iron lung for all but a few hours per week, and ultimately lost his virginity to a surrogate.

Read more at the Atlantic 
physically disabled

Medical Sex Workers



This is a sensitive, if not controversial discussion on why adults with severe mental and physical disabilities are not given chances to explore their sexuality.  

  In this short Vice video we meet a female medical sex worker who's job at the White Hand organization involve giving severely disabled clients non-intimate sexual relief. We also meet her client, a man with Cerebral Palsy (?).    

 The mindset is that since sex is a basic human need, it should come as no surprise that despite whatever the disability, that sexual desire and yearning for closeness does not necessarily go away.  

  In turn, when the general public naively denies or refuses to acknowledge the very real sexual feelings of someone with Cerebral Palsy, Dementia, Spina Bifida etc., they are also denying them a chance to be fully apart of society and enjoy/explore their own urges.   

 This video is in Japanese so enabling the Youtube close caption (cc) is needed.   

 [WARNING: This video does contain some graphic content. Although it is censored, viewer discretion is advised.] 
cerebral palsy

Sex After Dementia


Earlier this year, a sex worker in Sydney, Australia -- I'll call her Emma -- got a call from a woman whose 93-year-old father was confined to a nursing home with dementia.

 "You could tell in her voice that she was really nervous. But you could also tell that she knew what she wanted for her dad," Emma said. He missed the intimacy of sex.

 Emma works a day job in elderly care, but she has also been a sex worker specializing in working with people with disabilities, including dementia, for 30 years.
"

 This nursing home resident had been an "openly sexual" person in his later life and had now asked his daughter to find him a woman. The nursing home staff was supportive, welcoming Emma into the facility and assisting her to move the elderly man into a comfortable position.

 Many of Emma's clients don't have long to live. The man died within a month and a half of her visit, but his daughter said he was more relaxed, less agitated, after seeing Emma. She remained grateful to her for her services.

 "I've got something to give," said Emma. "I've got the most intimate gift of all."
How residents in care facilities should receive this gift is an ethical minefield. Astudy by Australian researchers found that nursing home residents "including those with dementia, saw themselves as sexual beings and with a continuing need and desire to express their sexuality." But a further study in theAustralian Journal of Dementia Care by some of the same authors found that only 20 percent of Australian nursing homes had policies about sexuality or sexual health. Most of them framed intimacy among residents as disruptive or problematic behavior.

 According to the World Health Organization, 35.6 million people have dementia worldwide and that number is projected to double every twenty years. A large proportion of those people with dementia will die in a residential aged care facility. While the elderly are free to do what they like in their own homes, once in facilities, their sex life is regulated by staff. Far from all of them are as sympathetic as the nursing home that Emma described.

 The study in the Australian Journal of Dementia Care found that staff were anxious about addressing sex among their residents. They were chiefly concerned about the reactions of a resident's family, as well as the legalities of the arrangements.

 Dementia can be caused by a range of pathology -- most commonly Alzheimer's, as well as small blood clots in the brain, and abnormal proteins called Lewy Bodies, among others. In some cases the frontal lobe, which is responsible for sexual drive and interest as well as inhibition, may be affected. As Carmelle Peisah, New South Wales branch chair of the faculty of psychiatry and old age at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, told me, it can affect "the part of the brain that stops people from acting on their sexual urges in public, such as masturbating. People have thoughts that they wouldn't act on without dementia, but with dementia they might act on it because of this lack of impulse control."

 In instances where residents might express their sexuality inappropriately -- say, by masturbating in public spaces of a nursing home, Peisah says that it is crucial for staff not to chastise the person. Instead they should be redirected to a private space, or be provided with an appropriate outlet for the expression of their needs and behavior -- or both.

 Other aspects of sexuality, such as emotional feelings like intimacy and warmth, are driven by the limbic system of the brain. "The needs and importance for social and physical relationships and in particular intimacy continue well into the moderate to severe stages of dementia," Peisah said.
Then there is memory loss -- the most infamous and obvious symptom of dementia, eventually including the diminished ability to recognize people. Residents may not know who the object of their erotic interest is. "Sometimes people can't tell the difference between their spouse, the care worker, or a fellow nursing home resident," Peisah said.

 In Alice Munro's 1999 short story "The Bear Came Over The Mountain," which was subsequently made into the critically acclaimed film Away From Her, the protagonist has to cope with his Alzheimer's-stricken wife entering a nursing home and falling for another resident, forgetting about her husband. The scenario is not uncommon in real life.

 Last year, my own grandmother entered a residential aged care facility with vascular dementia. When I visited, she had little interest in talking to me. Instead, she held hands with Eric, a cheerful fellow resident with a room across her corridor. He introduced my grandmother as his wife. In Russian (she spoke no English), she told me that he was a neighbor from Belgorod, our hometown. I hope for their sake that whatever they had -- if they wanted it to -- extended beyond handholding, because within six months both of them had died. Neither Eric nor my grandmother had living spouses, and situations like Munro's story can be very distressing for living partners who feel they have been replaced. Still, considering the importance of the happiness and well-being of your loved one in their current, new reality, can be reassuring.

via The Atlantic 
Alzheimer's
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