Self-Help Therapies for Sexual Dysfunction (Report‪)‬

Not everybody with a sexual problem goes to visit a professional. Some individuals, for various reasons, cannot; other individuals do not want to. Moreover, the capacity of the sexual health care service in many countries and regions is insufficient to accommodate the potential demand for help. As a result, in the last 4 decades various forms of "minimal interventions" in the treatment of sexual dysfunctions have been developed. In these interventions, contact with a professional who delivers treatment is limited or absent. Among these minimal interventions are self-help groups, bibliotherapy (i.e., self-help with assistance of a therapy manual, leaflet, or book), video therapy (with assistance of audiovisual material), telephone-based therapy, Internet-based therapy, and computer-based treatment algorithms. Some forms, like bibliotherapy, have proliferated and occupy a stable position in the field of treatment, as they are used by large numbers of individuals and couples that seek help. To accommodate these numbers, hundreds of new self-help titles are published every year. To illustrate, a search on March 25, 2008, of the amazon.com Web site, using self-help and sexual as search terms, resulted in 2,106 hits. Other interventions, such as Internet-based treatments, have only recently been put forward. Still others (like telephone-assisted therapist-administered treatments) are used mainly in specific, natural circumstances, for example, when people live large distances from mental health service centers or because they live abroad or in isolated geographical places rendering direct contact with a therapist difficult or impossible. Beyond sexual problems, minimal intervention strategies, often termed self-help therapies, exist for a broad range of mental and physical health problems (for a handbook of self-help therapies, see Watkins & Clum, 2008). In this review, the term self-help is used to represent both the constructs of self-help and the minimal interventions that are implemented. Self-help methods can be classified into self-help groups and media-based self-help (Watkins & Clum, 2008, p. 1), the latter including bibliotherapy, video therapy, therapy through telephone contact, Internet-based therapy, and computer-assisted therapy. This review is restricted to media-based self-help.