At the age of six Mariah Ross was sexually molested by a man who used porn to prepare himself for what he was about to do, a few years later, as she got older, she used porn as a coping mechanism to escape the torment of being assaulted.

 

“It became a numbing agent when I was binging on it,” she says “it kept me from not dealing with my emotions because when I was younger I did not really have anyone to talk to.”

 

Pornography became an addiction for Mariah for fifteen years, she would not deal with any emotions because she would bury her problems in porn and numb the pain for herself and act like everything was normal.

 

“Porn became a compulsion in my life, I used it to escape reality,” Mariah says. She also believed her mental health was deteriorating by binging on indecent material.

But Mariah was not aware that porn addiction was not classed as a mental health disorder, and still isn’t today.

 

“Porn addiction is not classed as a mental health illness but they do go hand in hand, one often causes the other,” says porn addiction specialist, Catherine Lyell.

 

Although porn addiction is not classed as a mental health illness, it does in fact cause mental health problems due to the way that the brain rewires and the neural pathways change. It affects the frontal lobe of the brain which is responsible for decision-making, concentration and focus.

 

Catherine says: “Porn addiction mainly causes anxiety, social anxiety as well as performance anxiety. But the most common characteristics that stem from porn addiction is lack of motivation and creativity.”

 

Porn addiction is classed as a neural addiction. By watching porn, the brain produces various chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin which gives the body a rush, almost like an adrenaline rush as their heart rates increase.

 

But over a period of time, the brain has to accommodate for all the extra chemicals being produced in the body, and therefore the brain has to rewire itself. Neural pathways then have to change as the brain gets addicted to these chemicals.

 

“Being someone who is a porn addict has a similar brain to someone who is a drug addict, because the brain ‘damage’ is exactly the same because they constantly need that fix,” says Catherine.