Volume 6 Issue 11 November, 2016
Sexually ‘Unconscious’
In the early years of my practice in the 1980’s I saw a 30 year old mother of two who was referred to me by a neurologist colleague with a h/o episodes of ‘unconsciousness’ of one month’s duration. It was reported that she would lose ‘consciousness’ between 11pm and 6am every day. During this period she would be ‘unresponsive’ to verbal and physical stimuli. She continued her day time household chores as usual with no change in her ability to care for the children and family. A psychological evaluation revealed that they were a very happy and sexually active and satisfied couple till about a month and a half back. Sometime before this ‘illness’ started her husband was introduced to pornographic video cassettes by his friend. After watching these for a few days he started having several and severe doubts about the quality of his sexual life that he had rated so far as good. How was it that that the person in the porn movie could perform for such a length of time and with so many variations!? In comparison his performance was so poor! He decided that his wife should also see the films and together they would work on improving their sexual life. They could watch the film at 10pm after the children went to sleep. She was shocked when she saw the film, felt it was unnatural and in disgust refused to see it again. Her husband insisted that they see the film so they could educate themselves and emulate what they had seen. When her protests fell on deaf ears she started falling ‘unconscious’ at 10pm and would be so till 6pm when she would have to get up to attend to the children. She clearly thwarted all his attempts.
In therapy the husband was educated about the nature of pornography, the professional actors involved and how far removed it was from reality. It was far from an educational film! With the dawning of insight there was a change of attitude in him. She stopped falling unconscious and they returned to their original sexually satisfying life.
Dr. Ravishankar Rao, Senior Consultant Psychiatrist, Bengaluru. rsrao90@hotmail.com
