Sex addiction - a disorder???...

Psychiatrists are analytical what is frequently referred to as sex addiction, a arguable and generally blurred action that has best afresh garnered account media absorption because of the travails of golfer Tiger Woods .

Sex addiction is not recognised by any official analysis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), advised the absolute chat on cerebral disorders, letters the Courier Mail .

However, the appellation 'hypersexual disorder' is actuality proposed for the fifth copy of DSM, due out in 2012.

The angle is actuality put advanced by Dr Martin Kafka, a analytic accessory assistant of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in the US, who says the ataxia has been alone for years.

He says it causes aggregate from conjugal dysfunction and annulment to added accident of adventitious pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

To be diagnosed with the ataxia a accommodating would accept to accommodated four of the afterward bristles criteria:

• Spending a 'great accord of time' captivated by animal fantasies and urges.

• Using animal behaviour to accord with demanding activity contest (or anxiety, depression, apathy or irritability).

• Disregarding the 'physical and affecting harm' to those involved.

• Patients charge accept approved but bootless to barrier the behaviour.

• Patients charge accept suffered ache and abuse to their accustomed life.

However, the arguable angle has critics annoying that the belief are too vague, and the affairs for misdiagnosis and artificial biologic analysis are too great.

Dr Paul Fedoroff, administrator of the Animal Behaviours Clinic at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, is a analyzer of Kafka's hypersexuality criteria.

He questions whether sex in acknowledgment to accent is unhealthy, and what is meant by 'a abundant accord of time' captivated by animal fantasies.

But Dr Dan Zucker, of the University of Toronto, who active a alive accumulation ambidextrous with the abutting copy of DSM, expects 'hypersexuality disorder' to be listed.

He admits the angle is arguable but says the affair is about area to draw the band on what is normal, and what is not.