Serious Question: What If Porn Is DRIVING The Mental Health Crisis?

Headlines, studies, news reports, and anecdotes all point us to the growing reality that we have a massive mental health crisis on our hands. But that’s not the only crisis we have.

Porn, which was once limited by the number of people who could access a naughty magazine or be in attendance to watch a strip show is now instantly available to almost everyone with an internet connection. A quick couple of clicks will get you instant access to more hours of high-definition images of every imaginable variation than could be watched in an entire lifetime. And more is being generated every day.

Because there’s a market for it.

We’ve all seen reports of the massive productivity loss at work as employees have used work computers to view explicit content. Studies have connected sexual dysfunction and diminished sexual satisfaction to the consumption of x-rated content. And kids are being exposed to it even before they’ve properly stepped into puberty. (A whole page of relevant stats here.)

Whenever we hear someone expressing concerns about the potential harms of such content, the libertines and the libertarians both default to the ‘consenting adults’ reply. It’s one of those so-called ‘victimless crimes’, or so we are told.

Is it, though? Cigarette smoking was ubiquitous in Western society. Until it wasn’t. What changed? The product was dangerous. Not just to the user, but to society as a whole. Second-hand smoke was one angle of attack against legitimacy. The addictive nature of smoking was another. And finally, the massive cost and burden of caring for all the cancer patients that a lifetime of smoking would inevitably produce.

Keep those arguments in mind as we look at some impacts of porn use that had not been part of the conversation, at least until now:

Problematic pornography use and psychological distress: A longitudinal study in a large US sample

The study investigated how problematic pornography use (PPU)—when someone struggles to control their pornography consumption, leading to negative consequences—relates to psychological distress, such as anxiety and depression, over time. It followed 4,363 U.S. adults (average age 50, about half women) for one year, collecting data at three points (every six months). The researchers wanted to see if PPU stays consistent over time and how it interacts with psychological distress, checking whether one causes the other or if they influence each other.

The findings showed some strong connections between PPU and emotional distress, including, for example, generalized anxiety disorder or depression.

From the abstract: “[…]This suggested a robust trait-like between-person association between PPU and psychological distress, with negligibly small time-dependent within-person inhibitory effects occurring. PPU appears time-consistent (e.g., most participants remained in their initial clinical category) and robustly associated with psychological distress over time.[…]”

As was the case before smoking became stigmatized and largely suppressed, a case must be made that the claims of harm are real. Pornography, after all, is a far bigger money-maker than Big Tobacco ever was, and this line of questioning would threaten an entire business model.

But just like the secondary and long-term effects of an addictive product like tobacco became significant drivers of the public health conversation, the very real consequences of a mental health crisis could prove very much relevant in an honest conversation about the place easily-procured pornography should or should not have in modern society.

In many places, tobacco now has strict rules governing its advertising, packaging, and the age limits of anyone wanting to purchase it.

Will future studies show a direct causal relationship between pornography and the looming mental health crisis we’ve been warned about for so long? If so, the good news is that bottlenecking access to such harmful content will go a long way to alleviating the growing mental health crisis.

But even if those harms ARE proven, would we have the moral courage it would take to stigmatize it and pull the plug on a multi-billion dollar ‘industry’?