Course Description
Digital technologies now shape how people meet partners, communicate desire, consume sexual content, maintain relationships, and experience intimacy. At the same time, clinicians increasingly encounter concerns involving compulsive sexual behavior, problematic pornography use, technology-mediated relationship conflict, AI companions, sextech, sextortion, nonconsensual intimate imagery, and sexual deepfakes. This course reviews current diagnostic frameworks and recent research, with particular attention to U.S.-based primary data, while emphasizing careful differential assessment, consent, functional impairment, cultural context, relationship agreements, and evidence-informed treatment.

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the current ICD-11 framework for Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder and distinguish it from non-diagnostic terms such as “sex addiction” and “pornography addiction.”

2. Identify core clinical features of CSBD and PPU, including impaired control, functional impairment, persistence despite adverse consequences, and the role of moral incongruence.

3. Differentiate CSBD/PPU from high sexual desire, consensual sexual variation, bipolar-spectrum symptoms, substance- or medication-related changes, obsessive-compulsive phenomena, and other relevant conditions.

4. Explain how digital environments—including pornography platforms, dating applications, social media, AI-mediated interactions, sextech, and image-based sexual abuse—can shape sexual behavior, intimacy, relationship expectations, and clinical concerns.

5. Apply an evidence-informed, culturally responsive assessment approach that considers consent, relationship agreements, impairment, comorbidity, values, and client-defined goals.

6. Summarize current evidence for psychological and pharmacological interventions, including the strongest available evidence for cognitive-behavioral and acceptance-based approaches, while recognizing limitations in the treatment literature.

Course # 20-1410270