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(LifeSiteNews) – A study of Catholic university students has found a strong association between pornography use and depression and anxiety.
The study, conducted by the Franciscan University of Steubenville and published in Frontiers of Psychology last year, found that the average depression, anxiety, and stress levels of students reporting any pornography use in their lifetime were “significantly higher than” those who said they had never viewed pornography.
In addition, those who had viewed porn within the past year had significantly higher levels of depression than those who had viewed pornography over a year prior to the survey.
Interestingly, for females, the correlation between porn use and levels of depression, as well as anxiety and stress, was stronger than it was for men.
The differences in mental health measures of depression, anxiety, and stress were more pronounced between weekly porn users and “non-users.”
Of the 1,031 students surveyed by the university, 34 percent were male and 66 percent were female, and 87.6 percent of the young men reported having used porn within their lifetime compared with 40.9 percent of young women.
The study did not clearly establish causation behind the correlation — that is, whether porn use causes depression and anxiety, or whether those mental health deficits prompt porn use. However, the responses to added questions concerning the practical effects of porn use, and the physical and emotional states preceding porn use, prompted the researchers to speculate that the causation is bidirectional.
The researchers found, for example, that over half the men who used porn reported they did so “often” or “very often” when they were “feeling down,” indicating that porn here is used to “alleviate negative feelings,” similar to how people who abuse drugs are often attempting to “self-medicate.”
The study authors also observed that levels of depression and anxiety “may also be potentially mediated by some level of self-disgust, which may contribute to” what the study found was a very common expression of a desire to stop viewing pornography: 77.6 percent of the men and 62.8 percent of the women indicated they thought they should spend less time on porn websites.
Moreover, over half the men indicated they continued accessing porn despite their intention to stop, and almost half the men said they found it difficult to stop viewing porn while online.
A study published in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure may also indicate that porn use itself contributes to depression. It found that the earlier men started using porn, the more likely they were to be depressed as men in college. Depression rates in men who started using pornography in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college were 11.7 percent, 7.1 percent, 4.9 percent, and 5.9 percent, respectively.
One of the most compelling explanations for this is that, as it has been increasingly observed by psychologists as well as neuroscientists, porn use has a devastating effect on the brain, rewiring it to what neuroscientist Rachel Anne Barr calls a “juvenile state.”
Barr noted in an article published by The Conversation and reshared by Neuroscience News that “ porn scenes, like addictive substances, are hyper-stimulating triggers that lead to unnaturally high levels of dopamine secretion,” which “can damage the dopamine reward system and leave it unresponsive to natural sources of pleasure.”
She continues to note that “studies show that changes in the transmission of dopamine can facilitate depression and anxiety,” and that “in agreement with this observation, porn consumers report greater depressive symptoms, lower quality of life and poorer mental health compared to those who don’t watch porn.”
Barr adds that porn use “has been correlated with erosion of the prefrontal cortex,” which enables executive functions such as “willpower” and “impulse control.”
It is noteworthy that one 2017 study found that men who “believe porn is always immoral but watch it anyway are more likely to experience depressive symptoms” than those who do not hold such moral objections.
It is unknown how the moral beliefs of the students from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, which is considered one of the few faithfully Catholic colleges in the United States, affect the results of the university’s study regarding porn and depression as compared with the general population.