In college, I read an article about Russian "whipping therapy. Yet it still appears in occasional articles as a real, if controversial, treatment: 30 to 60 cane strokes or whip lashes administered to patients' buttocks to promote serotonin flow.
The treatment is not intended to be sexually stimulating for either the patient or the doctor. When I first became active in the kink scene, I was in the middle of a major depressive episode.
I'd known I was kinky long before I started showing symptoms of depression, so it wasn't that I worried my depression was the result--or the cause--of my BDSM interest. But it made navigating my early years in the scene somewhat difficult. Like many people with depression, I sometimes have trouble acknowledging that I've reached the point where I need help.
It becomes hard to remember how my "normal" mind works, so I become convinced that I've always felt this way, thought this way, and that it's a problem with my character, not my chemical makeup. But some part of me usually knows when things are getting bad, even if I don't want to admit it. My body has a very high pain threshold, and processes some types of pain as pleasure. A fair amount of mainstream media has portrayed BDSM as a perversion stemming from mental illness or trauma--one that offers the top an outlet for aggression and shame, or the bottom a means to perpetuate a cycle of abuse or self-destruction.
The desire to receive or give intense pain seems to be a common target. How can you want to hurt someone if you're mentally stable? How can you want to be hurt if you value yourself? I write erotic romance, a genre that has seen a huge increase in BDSM-themed books over the past few years. It's an equally dangerous idea, in a way--if you try to apply it to real life. Mental illness needs to be treated by professionals. Not by a play partner. Not through sex or bondage or whipping.
