Covid-19 and its psychological consequences have ‘hurt’ sex inside and outside the couple. Word of Marco Inghilleri, vice president of the Italian Society of Sexology and Sexual Education (Sises) and director of the center for legal psychology, clinical sexology and psychotherapy in Padua. “In the couple – he explains to time.news Salute – conflicts have increased exponentially more due to personal dynamics than strictly family ones”, and outside stable relationships “above all due to an increase in paranoia regarding the risk of contagion”. To the point that “we can estimate an increase of about 35% in anxiety disorders with related sexual problems and of as much as 56% for depressions” which for males mainly occurred with erectile dysfunction problems “.
“The pandemic – says the sexologist – has exacerbated the stress to which each person is subjected every day, making life much more complicated than it already is. Just think of the difficulties experienced in the family due to the lockdown and all the restrictions that came later. Everything has been suffered by the individual and sexuality cannot be separated by those who experience it “, he stresses. Outside the stable couple, “paranoia has especially increased, because the paradoxical communication that has taken place in recent months has created a sort of polarization, a process of ‘symmetrical schismogenesis’, for which either hypochondriac anxieties about the virus have developed, so ‘everything must be disinfected, sterilized’, up to ‘I ask you if you have the Green pass’, or the exact opposite, that is, no precautions and I challenge the virus “.
Finally, the expert points out that at the basis of these phenomena “there is above all the fact that the lack of perspective is taking hold in people, the belief that ‘we won’t get out of Covid'”. Because if last summer we all believed that it was over and then the second wave arrived, “now we talk about the second dose, and then the third” and so on, and the idea is precisely of something without end. “This – concludes Inghilleri – has a devastating effect on people’s psyche”.