Rachel Hale

There's a big intersection of the porn recovery support groups and other male mental health and like male motivational forums on Reddit specifically, though there are others.

And some of these groups have 1 million members, some of them upwards of half a million weekly visitors.

And I, in my research, came across more than five, maybe a dozen of these groups total.

And so what really struck me about it is just how many men are struggling with this.

And of those men who are going to seek that support, how many might be struggling silently to where they would have sought out these groups.

And some of these different forms will have monthly challenges and

People will use these forums to post updates about their recovery journey, to share their stories and to seek out support from others.

Often younger boys seeking out advice may be from older people on the forums.

And of course, these forums aren't exclusive just to men.

But after speaking to moderators, it was clear anecdotally that there are a lot of men who are using these forums as a first step place.

As is true when we look at other behavioral or substance issues, there's a lot of stigma associated with this.

It's something that people really don't want to talk about, even though we know that it's impacting so many people's lives.

And when you combine that with what we know about the male loneliness epidemic and that males have less people in their lives who they feel comfortable talking to about their emotional hardships, males have less close friends who they feel comfortable talking to about this type of thing,

it makes sense that these anonymous forums could be a really comfortable first step to seek this out that feel less intimidating than seeking out professional support.

One thing that's really interesting about this is that there's a very wide debate in the medical field about whether or not compulsive porn use should be classified as an addiction or not.

And the DSM-5 does not recognize compulsive porn use as a formal disorder, though these online communities of men who have been impacted say that to them it feels like an addiction.

Medically, that's not something where there's agreement on how it should be classified.

But what these mental health professionals I spoke with do all agree on is that this is a serious problem that is impacting more young men now than before.

And that for a lot of these men, and this lines up with what these young men who I interviewed told me,

Porn is an outlet for something.