What's up with David Duchovny (star of 'X-files'
and 'Californication') checking into rehab for sex addiction? Is this
seriously considered a "mental illness"? (Who wouldn't be addicted to
sex married to someone who looks like Tea Leoni?) At least he checked
in for voluntarily treatment, as opposed to the coercive variety, a
distinction made by Dr. Szasz. I am curious to know what therapeutic
interventions are available currently for the so-called sex-addict.
In a discussion of the medical perspective on addiction Szasz
explains:

'The medical perspective on habits logically locates the nature or
the "problem"--whether it be self-abuse or food-abuse--in the
affected organ rather than in the person who has the habit. It is
very much as if a person who speaks English with a foreign accent
because he has lived abroad as a child were subjected to some sort
of "reconstructive surgery" on his mouth, tongue, and teeth, to
correct his faulty speech habits. The manifest absurdity of this
sort of surgery, and the even more manifest sadism of the surgeons
who perform it and the gullibility of the patients who submit to it,
have not dampened the recurring enthusiasm for ever-new
surgical "cures" of this kind. Thus, in the nineteenth century,
clitoridectomy in girls and circumcision in boys were accepted
methods of treatment for masturbation. Amputation of the penis was
advocated, as recently as 1891, by one of the presidents of the
(British) Royal College of Surgeons. In the twentieth century
surgeons continue==for certain "bad habits" of thought, speech, and
conduct called "schizophrenia"--to mutilate a perfectly healthy
organ, the brain. The discoverer of this "treatment," Egas Moniz,
received the Nobel Prize for it. The treatment itself, called
lobotomy or leucotomy, has also been used on addicts.'

--Thomas Szasz, from 'Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of
Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers'

Hope the doctors treating Duchovny don't resort to anything this
drastic!