Clinical literacy glossary

Explore each term in this topic, then open its full explanation for context, sources and related reading.

Compulsive sexual behaviour disorder
An ICD-11 impulse-control disorder involving a persistent failure to control intense, repetitive sexual impulses or urges, resulting in repetitive behaviour and marked distress or significant impairment over an extended period.
Conversion practices
Interventions or practices directed at changing, suppressing or preventing a person's sexual orientation or gender identity because one outcome is presumed preferable. They may be presented as therapy, counselling, prayer, discipline or support.
Distress and impairment
Clinical concepts describing significant suffering and meaningful disruption to important areas of functioning. They help distinguish a disorder from harmless difference, ordinary variation or external disapproval.
Hypersexuality
A broad and inconsistently used term for sexual thoughts, urges or behaviour perceived as unusually frequent or intense. It is descriptive rather than a single agreed diagnosis.
Intrusive sexual thoughts
Unwanted sexual thoughts, images or urges that enter awareness and may feel disturbing, repugnant or inconsistent with the person's values. Their occurrence does not establish desire, intent, identity or future action.
Kink-aware clinician
A clinician with enough knowledge and reflective practice to understand consensual kink without automatic pathologising, while still assessing health, consent, coercion, distress, impairment and risk professionally.
Psychosexual therapy
A form of talking and behavioural therapy addressing sexual wellbeing, function, pain, desire, relationships or distress. It may involve individual or relationship work and structured exercises completed privately outside sessions.
Sex addiction
A popular and treatment-community label for sexual behaviour experienced as out of control, based on an addiction model that remains contested and is not equivalent to a universally recognised diagnosis.
Sexual dysfunction
A clinical umbrella for persistent or recurrent difficulties involving desire, arousal, erection, lubrication, orgasm, ejaculation or pain, considered through duration, context, personal distress and applicable diagnostic requirements.